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For Fish (Large flounder teaspoonful)
1 large flounder 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley 3 tablespoonfuls breadcrumbs 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 teaspoonful powdered herbs 1 pinch powdered mace Salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste 1/2 cupful picked shrimps 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley
This entry is an ingredient list for a stuffed baked flounder; the method itself is not on the page. Everything below assumes you will supply the technique.
- No method is givenThe quantities describe a shrimp-and-crumb stuffing for one large flat fish. A common way to handle a whole flat fish is to slit it along the backbone on the dark side, work a pocket open over the bone, fill it and bake, though the page itself says nothing about technique. If you want the original wording, look for the instructions elsewhere in the book rather than guessing at oven times.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book exists to sell it. In a fish stuffing it is doing the job butter would do; 2 tablespoons of butter substitutes directly.
- Parsley listed twiceA teaspoonful of chopped parsley appears at both the start and the end of the list. That is almost certainly a typesetting duplication rather than two separate additions, though it may reflect a garnish. Treat it as one teaspoon in the stuffing unless you want green on the plate.
- Powdered herbsShorthand of the period for a dried mixed-herb powder, typically some combination of thyme, marjoram, savory and sage, either bought mixed or dried and pounded at home. Half a teaspoon of a dried poultry-seasoning blend is a reasonable modern stand-in.
- MaceThe lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold ground. It is warmer and less sweet than nutmeg and was a standard seasoning for fish and forcemeat. A pinch is genuinely a pinch here; mace dominates quickly.
- Picked shrimpsSmall cooked shrimp taken out of the shell. Half a cupful is roughly 3 oz of shelled shrimp. As they are already cooked, they only need warming through in the stuffing.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. The recipes of this period distinguish black pepper for body and red pepper for heat.
- Size and yieldThe recipe specifies only a "large flounder", i.e. a whole fish rather than fillets. This amount of stuffing suits a whole fish; scale down for the fillets sold today.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which the company introduced in 1911. Books of this kind gave a full year of planned menus with recipes attached, which is why entries often read as bare ingredient lists. The recipes call for Crisco in place of butter, lard or suet, and the fish chapters were an easy sell: shortening was pitched as neutral in flavour and clean-burning, which mattered for a household frying or basting delicate fish. Stuffing a whole flat fish with a shrimp-and-crumb forcemeat is much older than the book, descending from English forcemeat cookery, where a pounded mixture of breadcrumbs, fat, herbs and mace filled everything from poultry to pike.