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August 9
Menu: Casserole of Lamb; Rice; Spiced Peaches *Macaroon Pudding; After Dinner Mints; Coffee; mac- Macaroon Pudding-Soak 6 aroons in 1½ cup milk. Heat 2 cups milk in double boiler, add 2 tablespoons cornstarch moistened with 1 well beaten egg, 1 teaspoon Crisco, ½ teaspoon salt, and macaroons. Cook Turn for 20 minutes, remove from fire, add 1½ teaspoon vanilla extract. into Criscoed and sugared pudding dish, sprinkle 1/2 cup sugar on top, and cover with sliced peaches. Serve cold.
A cornstarch-and-egg milk pudding built on soaked macaroons, from the era when Crisco was being pushed into every recipe in the book, sweet ones included. The text breaks off mid-instruction at "Cook," so the finish has to be reconstructed from how these puddings work.
- The missing endingThe verbatim text stops at the word "Cook." A cornstarch pudding of this ratio is cooked over the double boiler, stirred, until it visibly thickens and no longer tastes of raw starch, then poured into a mould or cups and chilled. No sugar is listed, which is unusual but plausible given the macaroons carry the sweetness.
- Which macaroonsIn this period an American macaroon usually meant a crisp almond-paste and egg-white biscuit rather than a French macaron, though coconut macaroons were also in circulation by then. Italian amaretti are the closest common stand-in; six of them is on the order of an ounce, enough to dissolve into the milk and flavour the pudding with bitter almond.
- Crisco, and whether to botherOne teaspoon of shortening in three and a half cups of pudding is a token gesture toward the sponsoring product rather than a functional ingredient. Butter does the same job of enriching the mouthfeel and tastes better; plain shortening contributes almost nothing here.
- Tempering the eggThe recipe has you beat the egg into the cornstarch and add the mixture to hot milk. Slacken the starch and egg with a ladle of the hot milk first and whisk it back in, or the egg will set in threads before the starch has a chance to swell.
- The double boiler is not optionalEgg plus cornstarch over direct heat scorches and curdles at the bottom of the pan. Indirect heat is the whole reason the pudding is written this way; it will take 10 to 15 minutes to thicken rather than 3, which is the trade.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon in a mildly sweet milk pudding is on the assertive side by modern palates, especially with salted butter in place of the Crisco. A quarter teaspoon is closer to current practice.
- Yield and servingThree and a half cups of milk sets into roughly four to six small moulds. Serve cold, and it wants a stewed fruit, a spoonful of jam or a little cream alongside, since the original gives it nothing.
The Story of Crisco, as the running head suggests the book to have been, was a marketing document as much as a cookbook: Procter & Gamble launched its hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in 1911 and published recipe collections to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that was neither butter nor lard. That accounts for the odd teaspoon of Crisco in a milk pudding, where its structural role is nil. The pudding itself belongs to a much older family, the cornstarch blancmange that filled the dessert course of ordinary Victorian and Edwardian households once boxed cornstarch became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century. Soaking almond macaroons into the milk would have been an easy way to get almond flavour and a little sweetness out of yesterday's biscuits, and it suggests a kinship with the older English almond and macaroon puddings served in a dish lined with the crumbled cakes. The "Calendar of Dinners" framing, which appears to have slotted such a pudding into a numbered day of the month, looks like a period fashion: the housekeeper was to be relieved of deciding what to cook, so long as she cooked it in Crisco.