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Bobotee
1 pound lean beef or mutton, 6 ounces bread, 8 tablespoons Crisco, 4 onions, 4 tablespoons almonds, 1 tablespoon vinegar, 1 tablespoon curry powder, 1 tablespoon sugar, 2 teaspoons salt, and 4 eggs.
Soak bread in milk, then squeeze it, mince meat. Chop onions and fry in hot Crisco, keeping them of a pale color, add bread, curry, sugar, vinegar, and salt, then well mix in meat and eggs beaten. Crisco a pudding dish. Bake from 20 to 30 minutes. Serve in pudding dish garnished with slices of lemon and parsley. Can be eaten either hot or cold.
A Crisco-era rendering of South African bobotie, written for cooks who already knew what a pudding dish was and did not expect an oven dial. A few things need filling in.
- No oven temperature is givenBake at 350F. At that heat a shallow dish will set in the 20 to 30 minutes specified; a deeper one needs 45 minutes or more, until the centre reaches 160F.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell hydrogenated shortening, so Crisco appears where an older recipe would say butter, lard or dripping. Butter or a neutral oil works better here, and 8 tablespoons is generous for frying four onions — 3 or 4 is enough, with a little more to grease the dish.
- Pudding dishA round or oval earthenware baking dish of about 1.5 quarts, not a pudding basin. Serving it in the dish, as instructed, is still the right way; the mixture is soft and does not turn out cleanly.
- The milk is unmeasuredThe bread is soaked and then squeezed, so quantity is not critical — pour over enough to cover 6 ounces of bread, roughly a cup, and wring it out well. Squeeze harder than feels necessary; wet bread gives a sodden, greyish loaf.
- Mince the meat yourself if you can"Mince meat" in a book of this period meant chopping the meat fine or putting it through a hand grinder. Ready-ground beef or lamb is fine, but 1 pound of coarsely ground lamb shoulder is much closer to the original texture than fine supermarket mince.
- Onions pale, not brownedThe instruction to keep them "of a pale color" is the hinge. Browned onions push the dish toward a meatloaf; sweated soft and blond, they keep the curry-and-vinegar balance that makes it bobotie.
- Curry powder and almondsA tablespoon of a mild Madras-style powder is about right; bloom it in the fat with the onions for a minute rather than stirring it in raw. The 4 tablespoons of almonds should be blanched and slivered or coarsely chopped.
- YieldServes 4 to 6. Traditionally eaten with rice; the book's lemon slices and parsley are the period garnish and the lemon is genuinely useful against the richness.
Bobotie is among the dishes most often associated with the Cape Malay kitchen of South Africa, built on minced meat, milk-soaked bread, curry spice and a sweet-sour note from sugar and vinegar or fruit. The name is generally traced to Indonesian and Malay cookery brought to the Cape by enslaved people from the Dutch East Indies, and the spelling wanders wildly in English-language books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — bobotee, bobootie, bobotje. Cape versions are often said to finish with a savoury custard poured over the top and baked until golden; here the eggs are beaten straight into the meat instead, and the recipe appears in the Eggs section. That this South African dish turns up in an American shortening manufacturer's cookbook says something about how far promotional cookery ranged in search of novelty: Crisco was launched in 1911, and its recipe writers cast a wide net for dishes that could be recast around the new fat.