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Creamed Kohl Rabi
Slice Kohl Rabi, boil 20 minutes or until nearly tender, and arrange in a baking dish in layers with the following sauce: 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 tablespoons flour, 1/2 pint milk, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1 saltspoon pepper. Rub Crisco and flour together; add milk, cold. Stand saucepan over fire and stir continually until it reaches the boiling point; take from fire, and add salt and pepper. Then strain. Season each layer with pepper and salt, sprinkle the top with bread-crumbs and bake 20 minutes.
A plain white-sauce gratin from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks, where every recipe was written to showcase the then-new vegetable shortening. Little needs changing beyond filling in what the original leaves out.
- Peel firstThe recipe says only to slice, but kohlrabi skin is tough and fibrous, especially on bulbs larger than a tennis ball. Peel deeply enough to remove the pale layer beneath the skin, then slice about 1/4 inch thick.
- Twenty minutes is a lotYoung kohlrabi sliced thin is tender in 8 to 10 minutes of boiling. Reserve the full 20 for large, older bulbs, and stop while the slices still hold their shape, since they get another 20 minutes in the oven.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of milk is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A gratin of this kind wants 375-400F, long enough to brown the crumbs and heat through.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, but butter makes a better sauce here and can be substituted straight across in the roux, allowing for the water and milk solids it carries. The insistence on Crisco is advertising, not technique.
- Cold milk, constant stirringThis is the hinge of the sauce. Rubbing fat and flour together raw and then adding cold liquid keeps lumps from setting; if you stop stirring before it boils, the flour catches on the bottom and scorches.
- StrainingStrain only if the sauce has lumped. A properly stirred sauce needs no straining, and note that the instruction has you strain after seasoning, so taste again afterward.
- YieldTwo medium bulbs and one cup of sauce fills a small baking dish and serves three or four as a side.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and its makers had to persuade households accustomed to lard and butter that a shortening from a factory belonged in their kitchens. Free and cheap recipe booklets were the vehicle, which is why the fat is named by brand in every list of ingredients here. Kohlrabi itself, a swollen-stemmed cabbage whose German name is usually glossed as cabbage-turnip, though the German is itself generally traced to the Italian cavolo rapa, is often said to have been a familiar market vegetable in American cities with large German populations, but it never became a staple; dressing it in white sauce and crumbs was a common nineteenth-century treatment for boiled vegetables, and the surest way to make an unfamiliar one acceptable at table.