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For Sauce (Tablespoonfuls flour)
3 tablespoonfuls flour 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 slice carrot 1 slice onion 1 slice celery 1 blade of mace 1 bay leaf 6 whole peppers 1 sprig of parsley 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful thick cream For pudding. Boil fish in boiling salted water till done. Shred or break in small pieces, and free from skin and bone. Blend Crisco and flour in a saucepan over fire, add milk and stir till boiling, remove from fire, add eggs well beaten, seasonings, and mix well. Turn into Criscoed fireproof dish, cover with greased paper, set in warm water, and bake in moderate oven for thirty minutes. Serve with the sauce, potato balls, and chopped parsley. For sauce. Blend Crisco and flour in a pan over fire, add vegetables, mace, bay leaf, peppers, parsley, milk, and simmer for thirty minutes. Strain, return to pan, add salt, allow to heat, then add cream and it is ready to serve.
This is really two recipes printed as one: a baked fish pudding set in a water bath, and a strained cream sauce to go over it. The ingredient list at the top belongs only to the sauce, so read the method carefully before shopping.
- The missing ingredient listQuantities are given for the sauce alone. The pudding method calls for fish, milk and eggs with no amounts stated; a workable ratio for this style of pudding is about 1 lb cooked flaked fish, 1 cup milk, and 3 eggs, bound with roughly 3 tablespoons each of fat and flour. Treat that as reconstruction, not as the book's instruction.
- Milk in the sauceThe sauce method says to add milk, but no milk appears in its ingredient list. Something in the region of 1 1/2 cups would suit 3 tablespoons of flour before the thirty-minute simmer and the final cup of cream, giving a pouring sauce rather than a paste; the amount is a reconstruction, not the book's.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, hence its appearance in every line. Butter is the better choice here for a cream sauce; use it measure for measure. "Criscoed dish" simply means greased.
- A moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally read as around 350F. Thirty minutes suits an individual or shallow dish; a deep single mould will need longer, until a knife inserted at the centre comes out clean.
- The water bath is the hinge"Set in warm water" means a bain-marie, and it is what keeps the egg custard from curdling into a grainy, weeping block. The water should come halfway up the dish and never boil; the greased paper on top stops a skin forming.
- A blade of maceA blade is one piece of the dried aril of nutmeg, not a spoonful of ground mace. If you only have ground, use a scant pinch, since the sauce is strained and ground spice will cloud it.
- Whole peppersWhole black peppercorns, six of them, left in the sauce for the simmer and removed at the straining.
- Boiling the fishAny firm white fish works, but bring the water to a boil, slip the fish in and take the pan off the heat rather than boiling it hard for long. Overcooked fish will already be dry before it goes into a custard and back into the oven.
- Potato ballsSmall potatoes turned or scooped with a parisienne cutter, boiled and rolled in butter and parsley. Any plain boiled new potato does the same job.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities above, roughly four servings as a main course, more if it is one of several dishes at dinner. The recipe itself gives no amounts, so no yield can be read from it.
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 had gone on sale in 1911 and is often described as among the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortenings. That explains why a delicate cream sauce and a fish custard both begin with a fat that had existed for barely a few years: the book's job was to prove the new product could stand in for butter and lard anywhere. The dish itself is older than the shortening. Baked fish puddings set over water, made from boiled fish bound with a panada and eggs, run through nineteenth-century English and Scandinavian cookery. The strained white sauce infused with carrot, onion, celery, mace and bay is the richer sort of sauce that Anglo-American cookbooks of the period sometimes called a béchamel, though their naming was inconsistent.