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For Salad (Cupfuls sliced cold potatoes)
3 cupfuls sliced cold potatoes 1 cupful broken hickory nut meats 1 teaspoonful chopped onion Chopped parsley Cold cooked sliced beets Sliced lemon Lettuce leaves For dressing. Mix sugar, salt, and mustard, add Crisco and stir thoroughly; then add yolks of eggs well beaten, cream, and lastly vinegar. Cook in double boiler until consistency of cream. If milk is used instead of cream, add 1 teaspoonful flour to other dry ingredients.
For salad. Mix potatoes, nuts, and onion together, and place on crisp lettuce leaves; pour over dressing and garnish to taste with beets, lemon, and parsley.
A potato salad bound with a cooked, custard-style dressing — the standard American salad dressing before bottled mayonnaise became common. The page as printed gives quantities for the salad but not for the dressing, so read the method carefully before starting.
- The missing measurementsThe dressing lists sugar, salt, mustard, Crisco, egg yolks, cream and vinegar with no amounts given on this page. Any quantities would be invention on our part; cooked dressings of this kind are often built on something like two yolks to half a cup of liquid, but if you want a faithful result, work from a complete cooked-dressing recipe.
- CriscoThis book was published to promote Crisco, then a new hydrogenated vegetable shortening. It is still sold, though reformulated to remove trans fats. Softened butter behaves similarly in a cooked dressing and tastes better.
- The hinge: do not let the dressing boilEgg yolks set into curds well below boiling. Keep the water in the lower pan at a bare simmer, stir constantly, and pull the dressing off the heat the moment it coats the spoon. If it does break, a quick blitz with a stick blender will usually bring it back.
- The flour noteThe instruction to add a teaspoon of flour when using milk instead of cream is not optional fussiness — the extra starch stabilises the yolks against the lower fat content and makes curdling much less likely.
- CupfulAn American cup, 8 fluid ounces. Three cupfuls of sliced cooked potato is roughly a pound and a quarter raw, or three medium potatoes.
- PotatoesBoil waxy potatoes in their skins, peel while warm, and slice once cool. Floury baking potatoes will collapse into the dressing.
- Hickory nutsRarely sold shelled and seldom seen outside the American Midwest and South. Pecans are the closest relative in flavour and texture; walnuts work, with more bitterness.
- Beets and lemonCooked beetroot bleeds. Add it as a border around the plated salad rather than mixing it in, or the whole dish turns pink within minutes. Squeeze the lemon over at the table rather than letting cut slices sit.
- YieldServes four as a side, two as a lunch salad. Dress it shortly before serving; the cooked dressing thickens further as it chills.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had gone on sale in 1911 — which is why a vegetable shortening turns up in a salad dressing where a cook of the day would more likely have reached for butter or oil. The dressing itself is the older tradition: a cooked or "boiled" dressing of yolks, vinegar, mustard and dairy, thickened over water, which was the everyday American choice before cheap bottled mayonnaise arrived and became what most Americans now put on potato salad. It is generally said to have kept better in an unrefrigerated pantry and to have used vinegar rather than large quantities of oil, which was expensive. The hickory nuts point to the book's American Midwest audience; hickories were gathered rather than bought, and appear in period cookery in salads, cakes and candies wherever the trees grew.