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Egg Cutlets
Put 2 tablespoons Crisco into a pan, when melted, add 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk gradually, boil for 3 minutes, stirring all the time, then add 2 raw yolks of eggs, remove from the fire, add 2 tablespoons cooked chopped peppers, 6 chopped mushrooms, red pepper, white pepper, salt and nutmeg to taste and four chopped hard-cooked eggs. Turn on plate to cool. Shape into cutlets. Brush over with beaten egg, roll in fine breadcrumbs and fry in hot Crisco. Serve very hot with cream sauce.
This is a croquette mixture under another name: a very stiff white sauce bound with egg yolks, packed with chopped hard-cooked egg, then breaded and fried. The whole recipe turns on how firm the base gets and how cold it is before you shape it.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it, so it appears in nearly every recipe. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works — butter for the roux, and a neutral high-smoke-point oil for frying.
- The hinge: a very thick baseThe hinge: a thick base -- Two tablespoons each of fat and flour to one cup of milk is a medium sauce, not a paste, so the base here is looser than a typical croquette panada. Boil it the full three minutes and cook it down as far as you can; a loose base will slump on the plate and burst in the fat.
- Adding the yolksThe recipe adds the yolks and then takes the pan off the fire; safer is to remove it first and beat the yolks in quickly so they thicken rather than scramble. Stirring a spoonful of the hot base into the yolks first makes this reliable.
- Cooling"Turn on plate to cool" means spread it in a thin layer and leave it until cold and firm right through; a warm mixture cannot be shaped.
- Cutlet shapePeriod cutlets were flattened teardrops or small chop shapes, sometimes with a bit of macaroni stuck in the narrow end to mimic a bone. A flat oval fries more evenly than a ball.
- Peppers and mushrooms"Cooked chopped peppers" means sweet green or red peppers softened in fat first; the mushrooms should also be cooked and their liquid driven off, or they will wet the mixture. "Red pepper" here is cayenne, not paprika.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no temperature; by modern practice, shallow or deep fry at 365-375F. The base is cooked, so you are mainly setting the crumb coat, but fry long enough to heat the cutlets through — two to three minutes, turning once.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; the mixture should make roughly eight small cutlets, enough for three or four as a light main course. The cream sauce is a plain white sauce, thinner than the base, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe booklets Procter & Gamble published after introducing Crisco in 1911, and its purpose was to show that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard anywhere in the day's menus — hence Crisco twice in a recipe this short. The dish itself belongs to the large family of croquettes common in American and British cookery of the period: a thick panada, something chopped folded through it, chilled, crumbed and fried. Cutlet-shaped croquettes were a familiar presentation, the shape imitating a small chop, which let a meatless supper occupy the place on the plate where meat would be.