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Beans
Boil 1 quart beans until tender, salting them well when half cooked. Beat 1 tablespoon Crisco to a cream, beat in yolk 1 egg, 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley, 1 saltspoon black pepper, and 2 teaspoons lemon juice; when this sauce is well mixed stir it into beans, taking care not to break them, then serve.
A plain vegetable dish dressed with what amounts to an uncooked egg-yolk butter, in the manner of a maître d'hôtel sauce. Most of the work is in the last minute, and the sauce depends on the residual heat of the drained beans.
- Which beansNo soaking is called for, so these are most likely fresh beans — cut green or wax beans, or shelled fresh shell beans — rather than dried. A quart of cut beans is roughly 1 to 1 initial 1 initial 4 lb, enough for four to six.
- The quart measureVegetables in books of this period were often measured by volume in the raw, prepared state. Fill a quart jar loosely with the cut beans rather than trying to weigh to a fixed figure.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotional volume, so shortening appears where butter would otherwise. Unsalted butter, creamed soft, works well here and is closer to the butter sauces this dressing resembles.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. One saltspoon of black pepper for a quart of beans is a light seasoning by modern taste.
- Salting the waterSalt goes in half way through rather than at the start, possibly reflecting a belief that early salting toughens skins. Salting the water from the start seasons more evenly and does no harm to green beans.
- The hinge: heat, not stirringThe recipe says only to stir the sauce into the beans; drain them and fold the creamed yolk mixture through while they are still hot. The residual heat helps the sauce cling, and beans left to cool will give a rawer, greasier coating.
- The raw yolkThe yolk is never separately cooked. If serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use a pasteurized egg.
- ServingFold with a rubber spatula, lifting rather than stirring, so the beans stay whole, and send it to table immediately — the sauce dulls and separates as it stands.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, was unfamiliar to kitchens that had cooked with butter, lard and drippings for generations, and books like this one worked it into every course, including places where a cook would naturally reach for butter. The dressing itself is older than the product: creaming fat with a raw yolk, parsley and lemon and folding it through hot vegetables recalls the French maître d'hôtel butter, though that has no yolk, and the yolk here is there to give body and richness without the cook having to make a proper sauce on the stove.