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Cream Cheese and Pimiento Salad
Wash and dry 1 can pimientoes. Fill them with creamed cheese. Chill, slice and serve on crisp lettuce leaves with following dressing: Mix 1/2 tablespoon salt, 1/2 tablespoon mustard, 3/4 tablespoon sugar, and 1 tablespoon flour, and when thoroughly blended, add 2 egg yolks, slightly beaten, 3 tablespoons melted Crisco, 3/4 cup milk, and 1/4 cup vinegar. Cook in double boiler, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens. Strain and cool.
A boiled dressing and a stuffed-pimiento salad, both of them straightforward once the period vocabulary is decoded. The dressing is the part that can go wrong.
- The hinge: keep the dressing below a simmerTwo egg yolks with only a tablespoon of flour to protect them will curdle if the water in the lower pan boils hard. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir constantly until the mixture coats a spoon, around 170-175F, then strain immediately into a cold bowl.
- "Creamed cheese"This means cream cheese beaten soft, not a separate product. Let an 8 oz block come to room temperature and work it smooth with a spoon or paddle; cold cheese will tear the pimiento walls as you pack it.
- Canned pimientosThe recipe means whole peeled, roasted pimientos canned in liquid; the nearest modern equivalent is the small jars still sold, commonly labelled 4 oz. Drain them, open them out gently, and blot dry inside and out or the water will loosen the cheese and the slices will not hold.
- MustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard. Half a tablespoon of it is assertive, which is the point of a boiled dressing.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotional cookbook, so the shortening appears everywhere. Three tablespoons of any neutral oil, or melted shortening, behaves the same way here.
- Packing and chillingFill each pimiento tightly with no air pockets, roll it into a firm cylinder in plastic wrap, and chill at least two hours until solid. Slice with a thin sharp knife, wiping it between cuts.
- YieldThe milk and vinegar alone come to a cup before the yolks and fat go in, so expect nearer a cup and a quarter of dressing, considerably more than the salad needs; it thickens further as it cools. Keep it refrigerated and use within a few days. A small can of pimientos with 8 oz of cheese serves four as a first course.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, introduced in 1911, and the book's job is to show the new hydrogenated shortening doing everything butter and lard had done, including standing in for oil in a salad dressing. The salad itself sits at the meeting point of two young American industries: mass-produced cream cheese, sold in foil-wrapped blocks from around 1880 onward, and canned Spanish pimiento peppers, which American growers -- chiefly in Georgia -- had begun raising and canning commercially in the 1910s. The pairing of the two is generally traced to roughly this period and this kind of cookbook, and it hardened over the following decades into pimiento cheese as the South knows it. The boiled dressing served with it is older than the salad by a long way -- a thrifty cooked dressing thickened with egg and flour, common in American cookbooks before commercial mayonnaise became cheap and universal.