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Fried Egg Sandwiches
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 4 hard-cooked eggs 2 tablespoonfuls cream Salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste 2 rasped rolls Fritter batter Cut hard-cooked eggs free from shells into slices and pound with Crisco and cream to a paste. Season with salt, pepper, and red pepper. Cut rolls into thin slices, butter them, spread them with the mixture and make into small sandwiches. Dip each sandwich into some prepared fritter batter, and fry to golden brown in hot Crisco. Drain and serve hot.
Sufficient for twelve sandwiches.
A deep-fried egg sandwich from one of the early Crisco promotional cookbooks. The hinge is the frying fat: the batter has to set fast enough to seal the bread before it drinks the fat, which means genuinely hot fat and a sandwich pressed firmly closed.
- Rasped rollsTo rasp a roll is to grate off the outer crust with a coarse grater or file, leaving a smooth pale surface. It matters here because the batter clings to the soft crumb far better than to a hard crust. Soft dinner rolls or a firm white sandwich loaf with the crusts trimmed will do the same job.
- CriscoCrisco was new when this book was written and the recipe names it twice because the book was published to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works in the egg paste; for frying, use a neutral oil with a high smoke point.
- Red pepperIn this period "red pepper" means cayenne, not paprika and not chili flakes. An eighth of a teaspoon across four eggs is plenty.
- Fritter batter, unspecifiedThe book assumes you have a batter recipe to hand and gives no proportions. A plain coating batter of about 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and enough milk to reach heavy-cream consistency is in keeping; it should coat a spoon without running off.
- Frying temperatureFat at 365-375F. Cooler than that and the bread absorbs fat and collapses; hotter and the batter colours before it has set. Two minutes a side is enough since everything inside is already cooked.
- Making the pasteThe original says to pound the cooked eggs, shortening and cream to a paste, which is easily done in a mortar and produces a smooth spreadable filling. A food processor does it in seconds, but stop before it turns slack or the filling will squeeze out of the edges in the fryer.
- Sealing the sandwichesSpread the filling to within a quarter inch of the edges and press the halves together hard. Any filling reaching the cut edge will leak into the fat and burn. Chilling the assembled sandwiches for twenty minutes before battering makes them much easier to handle.
- Yield and servingTwelve small sandwiches, which is a first course or a savoury for six. They are only good hot and only within a few minutes of draining; batter-fried bread turns leathery as it cools.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, came onto the American market in 1911, and Procter & Gamble commissioned recipe books from established household writers to establish it as a substitute for both butter and lard, in baking and in the frying kettle alike. Hence a recipe that finds two separate uses for it in a single sandwich. The dish itself sits in an older tradition of fried sandwiches and battered fritters that filled out the "savoury" and light-supper courses of Edwardian menus, where deep-fried bread was ordinary rather than novel, and where hard-cooked eggs pounded to a paste are often said to have stretched a small quantity of food into a course that looked like an effort had been made.