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September 26
Menu: Sliced Lemon; Veal Cutlets; Baked Cucumbers Lyonnaise Potatoes; Red Pepper Salad; Amber Pudding; Coffee Amber Pudding-Peel, core, and quarter 8 apples. Put 3 tablespoons Crisco in a pan, when warm add apples, 3 tablespoons sugar, grated rind 1 lemon, and stew slowly till soft, then rub through a sieve. Add yolks of 3 eggs, and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon. Roll out Crisco pastry thinly, cut off a strip and press it on to the edge of a wet pudding dish. Put apple mixture into dish and bake for 30 minutes in a hot oven. Beat up whites of eggs with 1/2 teaspoon salt, to stiff froth, add 2 teaspoons sugar and 2 drops vanilla. Heap this meringue all over apple mixture. Dust with sugar and place here and there a glace cherry. Replace in oven to brown slightly.
An apple curd baked in a pastry-edged dish and finished with meringue. The text is compressed from a dinner calendar, so a few working details have to be filled in.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold, though the modern formula is a soybean and palm oil blend rather than the original hydrogenated cottonseed oil, so it will not behave identically. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and butter is better for the stewing step if you are not bound to the book's purpose.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; period "hot oven" corresponds to roughly 400-450F. Once the meringue goes on, drop to 325-350F so the surface colors without the egg white weeping or the filling cracking.
- The applesEight apples works out to roughly 2.5 lb. Use a variety that breaks down - Bramley, McIntosh - since the whole point is a puree fine enough to sieve.
- The hinge: yolks off the heatAdd the three yolks only after the sieved apple has cooled to warm. Stirred into hot puree they scramble, and the finished pudding turns granular instead of setting smooth.
- "A strip pressed on to the edge"This is an edging of pastry, not a lined crust. Wetting the rim of the dish is what makes it stick; the pastry browns as a decorative collar while the filling bakes as a custard.
- Meringue proportionsTwo teaspoons of sugar to three whites is very lean by modern standards and gives a soft, quickly-browning foam rather than a stable one. Closer to 2 tablespoons per white holds up better and slices cleanly.
- Half a teaspoon of salt in the whitesThat is a lot by current practice and will slow the foam. A pinch does the same job of loosening the whites.
- YieldRoughly a 1.5-quart dish, serving about six. Best eaten the day it is made - the meringue softens overnight.
Amber pudding is an old English name for sweet preserved-fruit or fruit-and-egg mixtures; the name is often said to derive from their color, and the older versions are traditionally associated with candied peel and ambergris-scented sugars, though none of this is securely documented. By the Victorian period the name had settled on apple or lemon curd fillings baked in a dish. Its appearance here is incidental to the cooking: The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to persuade cooks that a manufactured vegetable shortening could replace lard and butter in every department of the kitchen, and the book's Calendar of Dinners exists to show Crisco appearing in the pastry, the frying pan, and the stewed fruit of a single day's menu. The compressed run-on ending - the pudding sliding straight into September 27's pot roast - is the calendar layout, not a stray instruction.