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Broiled Lamb Chops
Trim and flatten chops, sprinkle each with sherry wine, rub with salt and white pepper and broil over a clear fire until they are done, according to the tastes of those who are to eat them. Melt together 4 tablespoons Crisco, if there are 8 chops, a small tumbler mint jelly, add to it chopped parsley and a few drops of lemon juice and pour over chops just as they are to be served. Guinea Hen, Roasted Truss 2 guinea hens, cover breasts with thin slices of bacon, and put in roaster and bake, basting often until tender. Remove bacon and brown. Melt in roasting pan 2 tablespoons Crisco, stir in 2 tablespoons flour, pour in gradually 2 cups scalded cream, and stir constantly. Strain, season with salt and white pepper, and, if liked, a tiny grain nutmeg, and pour this over guinea hens, or pass separately Serve with these, potato balls of uniform size, which have been sauted in Crisco and sprinkled with chopped parsley. Mutton Cutlets, a la Soubise 6 mutton cutlets, 1/2 cup dried beans, brown sauce, 2 onions, 3 tablespoons Crisco, and 1/2 cup white sauce. Trim cutlets, season them with pepper and salt, and fry in hot Crisco.
Soak dried beans in water for several hours, then boil them in a stewpan until tender. Drain, and pass them through a sieve. Melt Crisco in a saucepan, stir in sieved beans, add to them the onions, previously boiled and sieved, season, and stir over fire until hot. Then add white sauce. Dish cutlets in a circle on a hot dish, and put puree of beans and onions in center. Pour some brown sauce round and serve.
Three courses run together here without a break, all of them built around Crisco because this book was published to promote it. Read the page as three separate dishes: broiled lamb chops with a mint butter, roast guinea hen in cream sauce, and mutton cutlets on a bean-and-onion puree.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the reason the book exists. Butter is the better choice in all three dishes here, particularly in the mint sauce for the chops and the roux for the cream sauce; a neutral oil works for sauteing the potato balls.
- A clear fireCoals burned down past the flame stage, glowing and smokeless, so the chops take heat without soot or flare-up. A hot gas grill or a broiler element preheated for ten minutes gives the same effect. Lamb chops want a hard sear and a rested pink centre, roughly 4 minutes a side for a 1-inch loin chop.
- A small tumbler of mint jellyA tumbler is a drinking glass, so somewhere around 6 to 8 fluid ounces; "small" makes it genuinely ambiguous. For 8 chops, start with half a cup of jelly melted into the fat and taste. What you get is a loose sweet-sharp sauce, not the spoonful of jelly served alongside.
- Guinea henStill farmed and available from game dealers and some butchers; birds run 2 to 3 lb and are leaner and darker than chicken, which is why the breasts are barded with bacon. Roast at 375F, allow about 20 minutes per pound, and take the thigh to 165F. Two birds serve four to six.
- The cream sauceMaking a roux directly in the roasting pan is the point of the instruction: the flour picks up the fond. Scald the cream first as written, add it in stages, and strain it, since roasting-pan sauces always carry solids.
- Mutton cutletsTrue mutton is sheep over two years old, strong-flavoured and firm; it turns up now only at halal and specialist butchers. Lamb shoulder or leg chops substitute directly, though they cook faster and taste milder.
- Soubise, and the dried beansA soubise is properly an onion puree. Here it is stretched with dried beans, unspecified in the original but probably haricot or navy, which need soaking and then a good hour of simmering before they will go through a sieve. Boil the onions separately, as the recipe directs.
- ServingsThe chops as written feed four, the mutton cutlets three to six depending on size, the guinea hens four to six. Nothing in the original states a yield.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of a run of cookbooks issued by Procter & Gamble after Crisco reached the market in 1911, written to teach American cooks that a shelf-stable vegetable shortening could stand in for butter, lard and suet in every part of a menu, which is why the fat is named in nearly every line here. The dishes themselves are conventional Edwardian dinner-party fare: guinea hen barded with bacon and sauced with cream, and cutlets a la Soubise, a name generally traced to the eighteenth-century Prince de Soubise and attached ever since to a puree of onions cooked to sweetness. Mutton on this page is worth noting. It was still ordinary meat in an American household of the period, and its disappearance from butchers' counters over the following decades is one of the clearer markers of how narrow the modern meat trade has become.