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Fried Fish (Crisco egg Salt and pepper)
Fish Crisco 1 egg Salt and pepper to taste Crumbs Sauce Clean fish, season with salt and pepper. Dip in crumbs, brush over with beaten egg, and crumb again. Fry in deep Crisco and drain on brown paper. Sauce. Blend 1 1/2 tablespoonfuls Crisco with 1 tablespoonful flour in saucepan over fire, add 1 cupful of milk or cream and bring to boil, cook for a few minutes over hot water. Cool and add 2 chopped green bell peppers and 6 medium-sized chopped sour pickles.
A plain deep-fried fish with a cold, thick sauce that is essentially a béchamel treated as tartar sauce. Two things need attention: the fry temperature, which the original never gives, and the fact that the sauce must be fully cooled before the pickles and peppers go in.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated since 1911 — today's version is non-hydrogenated. Any neutral frying fat works; you need enough to submerge the fish, so 3-4 inches in a deep pot.
- Fry temperatureThe book assumes you know it. 365-375F. Below that the double crumb coat absorbs fat; above 385F the crumbs colour before the fish is done.
- The double crumb coatCrumb, then egg, then crumb again — no flour. This is deliberate and it works, but the first crumbing must go onto fish patted properly dry or the coating slides off in the fat. Rest the breaded fish 10 minutes before frying to set it.
- Fish and timingAssume fillets or small whole pan fish. Fillets of 3/4 inch take 3-4 minutes; a whole small fish 6-8. The fish is done when the coating is deep gold, and no period cookbook will tell you to check for 145F at the thickest point, so do it yourself.
- DrainingBrown paper means unbleached kraft, the grocer's bag. A wire rack over a sheet pan drains better and does not steam the underside; paper towel is the middle option.
- "Over hot water"A double boiler. Bring the milk and roux to a boil directly over the heat, then finish it over simmering water for the few minutes the recipe calls for, so the flour loses its raw taste without scorching.
- Cool before adding the picklesThe hinge of the sauce. Sour pickles and raw peppers stirred into hot white sauce will thin it and turn the peppers grey. Chill the sauce fully, then fold them in — six chopped pickles is a lot of liquid, so drain them well.
- Season the sauceThe ingredient list gives salt and pepper only for the fish. The sauce will need salt of its own, and a little of the pickle brine sharpens it usefully.
- YieldAbout a cup of white sauce before the additions; the two chopped peppers and six pickles bulk it up well beyond that.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre with a long history by 1911: the cookbook published by a fat manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble that year, was a hydrogenated vegetable shortening — it was neither lard nor butter nor oil, though earlier cottonseed shortenings had prepared the way, and the hydrogenation was new — and the company's answer was to commission recipe collections in which it appeared throughout, frying fat one moment and the base of a cream sauce the next. That is why the shortening turns up twice here, and why the ingredient line reads "Crisco" where an older book would have said drippings or sweet butter. The sauce itself is a familiar American compromise: a cooked white sauce standing in for the mayonnaise base of a tartar sauce, with pickle and green pepper supplying the sharpness. Cooked-dressing versions like this were common, and they hold up better on a warm table than an emulsified sauce does.