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Baked Apples
Core and peel 8 apples; fill centers with 1/4 cup Crisco creamed with 1/2 cup Crisco creamed with 1/2 cup brown sugar, add 4 tablespoons chopped citron peel, and 1 tablespoon lemon juice mixed together. Mix 2 tablespoons sugar with 1/2 cup water and brush over apples; sprinkle with crumbs browned in hot Crisco; bake for 20 minutes in moderate oven. Serve cold with custard. Terrapin, a la Maryland Put terrapin in kettle, cover with boiling salted water, add 2 slices each carrot and onion, and 1 stalk celery. Cook till meat is tender. Remove from water, cool, draw out nails from feet, cut under shell close to upper shell and remove. Empty upper shell, remove and discard gall bladder, sand bags and thick intestines.
Liver, small intestines are used with meat. Add terrapin meat to 3/4 cup white stock, 2 tablespoons wine; cook slowly until liquor is reduced half. Add liver separated in pieces, 2 yolks of eggs, 1 tablespoon Crisco, salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste, 1 tablespoon flour mixed with 1/2 cup cream, and 1 teaspoon lemon juice. Make hot and just before serving add 1 tablespoon sherry wine. Turn into hot dish and garnish with toast points. Belgian Hare, en Casserole Separate hare into joints; season with salt, paprika and red pepper, and saute in 1/4 cup Crisco with 2 slices of bacon cut in dice to golden brown. Put hare in casserole with 1 cup hot water and put on cover. Bake 30 minutes, then add 2 tablespoons Crisco rubbed into 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup water, seasoning to taste, and 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Cook in moderate oven for 3 hours. Send to table without removing cover.
Three unrelated dishes have run together on this page, and the first of them carries a printer's error. The terrapin recipe in the middle cannot be reproduced today for reasons given below.
- The duplicated line"1/4 cup Crisco creamed with 1/2 cup Crisco creamed with 1/2 cup brown sugar" is a typesetting slip; a phrase has been set twice. The filling was either 1/4 or 1/2 cup shortening creamed with 1/2 cup brown sugar — the surviving text does not settle which, though the smaller amount is the more sensible for eight apples.
- CriscoThis book was published to sell it, which is why it turns up in recipe after recipe, the terrapin included. Modern Crisco has been reformulated and carries far less trans fat than the 1915 product, though partially hydrogenated oils still appear on the label. Butter works better in the apple filling and in the crumbs; the flour-and-fat thickening for the hare is just a roux.
- Moderate oven350F. Twenty minutes will not cook eight whole peeled apples through — expect 35 to 45 minutes depending on variety, until a knife meets no resistance. Peeled apples slump, so use a firm baking variety and a dish that holds them upright.
- Citron peelCandied citron, the thick white rind of Citrus medica, once a fixture of the holiday pantry. Candied mixed peel or candied orange is the usual substitute; it is sweeter and softer than citron, so cut back on the brown sugar slightly.
- Serving the applesEight apples serve eight. "Custard" here means a pouring custard — crème anglaise or a thin boiled custard, served cold alongside.
- Terrapin: the speciesThe diamondback terrapin, the animal a Maryland-style terrapin dish assumes, is now protected or its harvest closed across much of its former range, and commercial harvest and sale are prohibited in the states that once supplied the trade, Maryland among them. For practical purposes the dish cannot be sourced legally today; anyone tempted would have to check current state law.
- Terrapin: the dressingThe instructions to remove the gall bladder, sand bags and thick intestines describe evisceration of an animal cooked whole in the shell first. A ruptured gall bladder contaminates the meat, and the recipe gives no guidance on judging that. This is a dish for which no modern substitute instruction should be offered — read it as a historical document.
- Belgian hareDespite the name, the Belgian Hare is a domestic rabbit breed, not a hare, and the meat is mild rather than gamey. Any farmed rabbit of about 3 lb, jointed, stands in. Three hours at 350F is far longer than modern rabbit needs — start checking at 1 hour and expect it tender by 90 minutes.
- "En casserole"In 1915 the casserole is the vessel: a lidded earthenware or enamelled pot taken from oven to table, which is why the recipe says to send it up covered. A Dutch oven does the same job. "White stock" is unsalted veal or chicken stock.
A Calendar of Dinners is one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned from Marion Harris Neil after Crisco was introduced in 1911, and it works exactly as advertising cookery does: every recipe, from baked apples to terrapin, has been rewritten to require the product. The trio on this page maps the ambitions of a middle-class American table just before the First World War. Terrapin à la Maryland was then among the costliest dishes a hostess could serve — Chesapeake diamondbacks were shipped live to New York and Philadelphia hotels and priced by the inch, a demand that collapsed the wild population and led eventually to the protections that make the dish unreproducible now. The Belgian Hare, meanwhile, was the product of a genuine speculative bubble: the breed was promoted in the United States around 1898-1901 as a cheap domestic meat animal, backyard hutches multiplied, prices for breeding stock soared and then crashed, and the name lingered in cookbooks for a generation afterward as a polite word for rabbit. The baked apples sit at the other end of the range entirely.<//>