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Rice Pudding
1/2 cupful rice 3 cupfuls milk 3/4 cupful sugar 1/4 cupful Crisco 3 eggs Powdered cinnamon to taste 1/4 cupful seeded raisins ½ teaspoonful salt Wash rice and steam it in milk until thick, then allow to cool. Cream Crisco and sugar, add well beaten eggs, raisins, salt, rice, and cinnamon. Grease pudding dish with Crisco, pour in mixture and bake one hour in moderate oven. 1/2 cupful sugar ½ cupfuls flour
The ingredient list as printed is scrambled and incomplete — a common fate for two-column cookbook pages. Read the method first, then work out what the list should have said.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for rice, milk, and Crisco, none of which appear in the printed list, while "2 cupfuls flour" appears in the list and is never used. A baked rice pudding of this size wants roughly 1/2 cup raw rice, 3 to 4 cups milk, and 2 to 3 tablespoons of fat. Ignore the flour entirely; it does not belong in this pudding.
- The salt is wrong1½ teaspoons of salt in a pudding built on 1/2 cup of sugar and three eggs would be unpleasant. Most likely a misprint for ½ teaspoon.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name though reformulated to remove trans fats. Butter works at the same weight and tastes better here; the book's preference for shortening is commercial rather than culinary.
- Moderate oven350F. One hour at that temperature will set a custard-bound rice pudding of about 6 cups without curdling it; the center should still be slightly loose when you pull it.
- Steam the rice in milkThis is the step that decides the texture. Cook the rice slowly in the milk until the grains are swollen and the mixture is thick and creamy, then cool it before the eggs go in, or they will scramble on contact.
- Creaming shortening with sugarAn odd instruction for a custard. It works, but simply stirring softened fat into the warm rice should give much the same result.
- YieldAbout six servings in a 1½ to 2 quart dish. Serve warm; it firms considerably on cooling.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to introduce American cooks to hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it and no obvious place in an existing kitchen. The book's solution was to take dishes everyone already knew — rice pudding among the plainest of them — and rewrite them with Crisco substituted for butter, lard, or suet, so that the novelty arrived inside something familiar. Baked rice pudding itself is far older, an economical nursery and Sunday dish across Britain and America built on the same logic as any milk pudding: a little grain, a lot of milk, eggs to set it, and long slow heat. Crisco was also marketed heavily as neither meat nor dairy, which made it useful in kosher kitchens, and P&G advertised that point directly.