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For Sauce (Tablespoonfuls flour) (II)
2 tablespoonfuls flour 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful milk 1/2 cupful oyster liquor 1 teaspoonful lemon juice Salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste 2 hard-cooked eggs 1 dozen small oysters For fish. Cook fish; remove skin and bone, chop it, then put it in a basin, add breadcrumbs, parsley, seasonings, milk, eggs well beaten, and melted Crisco. Mix well, turn into a Criscoed mold, cover with greased paper and steam one hour. Serve with sauce poured over, and dish garnished with lemon Slices.
For sauce. Blend Crisco and flour in pan over fire, stir in milk, oyster liquor, stir till it boils for eight minutes, then add seasonings. Boil one minute, add eggs chopped, and oysters. Mix and serve.
Two recipes are packed into one entry: a steamed fish mold and the oyster sauce that goes over it. Only the sauce ingredients are listed, so the fish half has to be built from proportions.
- The missing ingredient listThe fish mold calls for breadcrumbs, parsley, milk, eggs and melted Crisco with no quantities given anywhere on the page. For about 1 lb of cooked flaked fish, 1 cup soft breadcrumbs, 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, 1/2 cup milk, 2 eggs and 2 tablespoons melted fat gives a mixture that holds together without being dense.
- CriscoThis book was published by the makers of Crisco and names it at every turn. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works; butter improves the sauce noticeably, and the roux behaves the same either way.
- Oyster liquorThe strained liquid from shucked oysters, sold in the container with pre-shucked pints. If you have none, substitute fish stock or bottled clam juice rather than water, or the sauce falls flat.
- Eight minutes is too longEight minutes is longer than needed -- a flour-and-fat roux with 1 1/2 cups liquid thickens within two or three minutes of simmering. With only 2 tablespoonfuls of flour to that much liquid the sauce stays fairly thin, so the extra boiling mainly reduces it; thin with milk if it tightens.
- The oystersThey go in at the very end, off the direct boil, and need only a minute or two in the hot sauce until the edges ruffle. Held longer they shrink and turn rubbery, and their liquor thins the sauce.
- Steaming the moldUse a greased 1-quart pudding basin or loaf pan, cover with greased paper or foil, and set it on a rack in a covered pot with water halfway up the sides. One hour at a steady low boil; the mixture should be set through and firm to the touch. Let it stand a few minutes before turning out.
- Red pepperCayenne, used sparingly; a pinch is enough here.
- YieldThe mold serves four to six as a main course, and the sauce quantity matches it. Both are best made the same hour they are served.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company had brought to market in 1911; the book's relentless use of the brand name as both noun and verb ("a Criscoed mold") is advertising as much as instruction. The dish itself is older than the shortening: steamed fish molds and fish puddings, bound with crumbs and eggs and unmolded whole, were a familiar way of stretching a modest amount of cooked fish in Anglo-American cookery, and were often used for the remains of a boiled cod or haddock. The oyster sauce suggests a company dish rather than a strictly leftover one. Oysters were still comparatively cheap and plentiful in the 1910s, though the major Atlantic beds were already in decline by then, and a white sauce studded with them and chopped hard-cooked egg was a common dressing for boiled or molded fish.