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Grilled Potatoes
Cut cold boiled potatoes into 1/2 inch slices lengthways, dip in melted Crisco, sprinkle with chopped olives, pour over a little melted Crisco and send to table.
A three-line side dish from a Crisco promotional cookbook, written for cooks who already knew what "grilled" meant and did not need to be told. Read the title as the missing instruction.
- The missing step"Grilled" in this period means broiled — cooked under direct top heat, not on a barbecue. The printed text never says to apply heat, but the slices are meant to go under a hot broiler or salamander until the cut faces are browned and crisp, a few minutes a side. Without that, you have cold potatoes in fat.
- Start with the right potatoCold boiled potatoes are specified because they slice cleanly and hold together under the broiler; freshly boiled ones crumble. Boil them the day before, chill thoroughly, and use a waxy or all-purpose variety rather than a floury baker.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Crisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and today's product is reformulated with palm and soybean oils and less trans fat. Melted butter, olive oil or bacon fat all work here and taste better; nothing in the method depends on shortening.
- Half-inch, lengthwaysCut thinner than half an inch and the slices dry out before they colour. Lengthways slices give the largest flat face to the heat, which is the whole point of the cut.
- The olives"Chopped olives" most likely means the brined green olives that were the common grocery article of the day rather than oil-cured black, though the recipe does not say. Chop them fine, and if you are browning the slices, add them after the first side has coloured — they scorch and turn bitter under sustained direct heat.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is given. Salt the slices before they go under the heat; the olives supply some but not enough.
- YieldReckon on one medium potato per person as a side, two if it is standing in for the starch at a light supper. Serve immediately — the appeal is entirely in the contrast between a crisp hot face and a soft interior, and both are gone in ten minutes.
This comes from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook of the sort that flourished after Procter & Gamble introduced the shortening in 1911, with the brand name printed in the instructions where an older book would simply have said "dripping" or "butter." The recipe itself is older than the product — reheating cold boiled potatoes under a grill or before a fire was a common economy in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens, where the previous day's boiled potatoes were too valuable to throw out and too dull to serve again plain. The chopped olives read as the period's idea of a small luxury touch, olives being widely available in jars by the 1900s and appearing often in American cookbooks of the decade as a garnish for otherwise plain food.