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Woodford Pudding
(Kate B. Vaughn) 1 cupful sugar 1½ cupfuls flour 3 eggs ½ cupful Crisco ½ cupful buttermilk 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 cupful blackberry jam ½ teaspoonful grated nutmeg ½ teaspoonful salt Puddings 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful whipped cream
This is an ingredient list rather than a method — typical of the Crisco book, which assumed the cook already knew how a jam pudding went together. A few of the quantities have clearly suffered in printing, so read them with care before you start.
- The suspect fractionsThree entries read "1½" where "½" seems more likely: 1½ cupfuls of Crisco against 1 cup of sugar is a great deal of fat, 1½ cups of buttermilk would loosen the batter to a pour, and 1½ teaspoons of salt is heavy for a sweet pudding. Other recipes going under this name generally call for something nearer ½ cup shortening, ½ cup buttermilk and ½ teaspoon salt, but the reading here is a guess, not a certainty.
- CriscoCrisco in 1913 was a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening; the product sold today is a different blend of oils and is no longer partially hydrogenated. It creams with sugar much like butter; the two extra tablespoonfuls at the end are presumably for greasing the mould or pan, though the list does not say so.
- The soda and the buttermilkThe baking soda is there to react with the acid in the buttermilk and, to a lesser degree, the jam. Mix the soda into the flour or dissolve it in the buttermilk at the last moment and get the batter into the oven promptly — the lift is largely spent within minutes.
- The jamA cupful of blackberry jam is a structural ingredient, not a flavouring: it supplies sugar, moisture and acid. Seedless is easier to eat, and a thick preserve behaves better than a runny one.
- Baking or steamingThe list gives no method, pan or temperature; puddings of this family were done either way. As a modern starting point, baked in a greased tube or loaf pan at 350F it should need roughly 45 minutes to an hour; steamed in a covered greased mould set in simmering water, closer to two hours. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- The whipped creamThe cup of whipped cream is the accompaniment, not part of the batter. Puddings of this name are also often served with a warm butter-and-sugar sauce, which suits the spiced, jammy crumb.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. On the quantities given it would roughly fill a loaf pan or a mould of about a quart and a half, and might serve six to eight.
Woodford pudding is a Kentucky dish, its name generally traced to Woodford County in the Bluegrass, and it belongs to the same family as the state's celebrated blackberry jam cake — a soured-milk batter enriched with preserved fruit and warm spice, baked or steamed and served with a sauce. Jam went into cakes and puddings for practical reasons: before reliable year-round fruit, a jar of blackberry preserve put summer into a winter dessert while doing the work of sugar and liquid at once. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco (1913) is characteristic of that book, which collected regional American favourites from contributors and reprinted them with the shortening substituted for butter or lard, the whole volume serving as an argument that the new fat could do anything the old ones did. Kate B. Vaughn, credited here, was a household writer of the period.