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Fried Parsley
Crisco 1 bunch parsley Salt and pepper to taste Wash, pick and dry the parsley; put into frying basket and immerse in hot Crisco fifteen seconds or until crisp. Drain and sprinkle with salt and pepper. It should be a nice green color. If it turns black it has been too long in the fat.
Green Peas a la Maitre d'Hotel 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 quart shelled peas Salt and pepper to taste 1 tablespoonful lemon juice 2 springs mint 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 1 teaspoonful sugar Shell peas and throw into plenty boiling water containing a teaspoonful of salt, sugar, and mint; boil fast until tender, then drain. Mix lemon juice with Crisco and parsley; stir this among peas, reheat them, and serve at once.
Two short vegetable dishes from a Crisco promotional book, both simple but both with one step that decides the outcome.
- Dry the parsley completelyAny water clinging to the leaves will erupt in hot fat. Spin it in a salad spinner and then blot between towels until the sprigs feel papery, not cool and damp.
- Fat temperatureThe book only says "hot." Fat hot enough to crisp parsley in fifteen seconds is usually reckoned at somewhere around 350-375F; cooler than that and the leaves go limp and greasy, hotter and they blacken, which is exactly the failure the original warns about.
- Fifteen seconds means fifteen secondsParsley is thin enough to dehydrate almost instantly. Have the basket, a slotted spoon and a draining tray ready before the parsley goes in, and lift it the moment the bubbling slows and the green brightens.
- CriscoAny neutral high-smoke-point fat works: vegetable, peanut or canola oil. Modern Crisco has been reformulated so that it no longer relies on partially hydrogenated oil.
- Yield of the fried parsleyA bunch collapses to very little. This is a garnish to go alongside fish or fried meat rather than a vegetable course in its own right.
- A quart of shelled peasRoughly 1 1/4 lb shelled, which needs something like 3 to 4 lb of peas in the pod, and serves four. About 1 1/4 lb of frozen peas is the practical equivalent; they need only 3-4 minutes.
- "2 springs mint"A typesetter's error for sprigs. They go into the cooking water with the salt and sugar and are lifted out before dressing the peas.
- The maitre d'hotel dressingCreaming the fat with lemon juice and parsley off the heat, then folding it through the drained peas, keeps the dressing from splitting. Butter gives a far better result here than shortening and is what the dish is properly made with.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil as a promotional cookbook for Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening that Procter & Gamble launched in 1911, which is why a fat appears at the head of nearly every ingredient list here, including one where butter is the traditional and better choice. Fried parsley itself is much older than the book: it was a standard garnish in nineteenth-century French and English kitchens, heaped alongside fried fish or cutlets, and it survives in that role in classic restaurant practice. The second dish takes its name from maitre d'hotel butter, the simple compound of butter, chopped parsley and lemon juice named for the head of a household's service staff; substituting shortening for the butter in it is the clearest sign of what this volume was written to sell.