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Dressing (Tablespoonful Crisco Pinch)
1 tablespoonful Crisco Pinch of salt 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 tablespoonfuls vinegar 2 eggs 1/2 pint whipped cream
Salad
24 marshmallows 1 can pineapple 2 juicy apples 6 oranges Lettuce leaves For salad. Cut fruit and marshmallows into small pieces, then mix and chill. For dressing. Beat up eggs in double boiler, add vinegar, sugar, salt, Crisco and cook until thick. Cool and add whipped cream. Mix with fruit and serve on crisp lettuce leaves.
This is a formula rather than a set of directions — the book assumes you know how a cooked salad dressing is built. What follows fills in the gaps and translates the measures.
- The missing methodThis is a boiled (custard-style) dressing, not a vinaigrette. Beat the eggs with the sugar, salt and vinegar, cook over simmering water while stirring constantly until it thickens and coats a spoon, stir in the Crisco off the heat, cool completely, then fold in the whipped cream.
- Cook the egg base properlyThe eggs are the whole structure here, and they must reach 160F to be both safe and thick. Direct heat will scramble them — use a double boiler or a heatproof bowl over water, and never let it boil.
- CriscoCrisco in 1915 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, firm at room temperature; today's product is a soy/palm blend and behaves much the same. Any neutral solid shortening works, and a tablespoon of butter gives better flavor if you are not bound to the original.
- Half a pint of whipped creamGenuinely ambiguous. Read as a half pint (1 cup) of heavy cream measured before whipping, which yields about 2 cups whipped; if you read it as a half pint after whipping you use only about 1/2 cup of cream and get a much sharper dressing. The larger reading matches the sweetness and acid here.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period ran roughly 4 to 5 percent acetic acid, close to modern cider vinegar. Two tablespoons against 2 tablespoons sugar and a cup of cream is a mild, sweet dressing — taste before folding in the cream and add vinegar by the teaspoon if you want it brighter.
- Fold cold into coldIf the cooked base is still warm the cream will deflate and the dressing will slacken within minutes. Chill the base thoroughly, then fold, then serve within a few hours.
- Yield and useAbout 2 1/2 cups, enough for a large fruit salad or a head of cabbage. It suits sweet salads — apple, banana, pear, canned fruit, shredded cabbage — rather than green leaves, which the cream weighs down.
- KeepingCream and cooked egg together keep about two days refrigerated, and the dressing will weep. Make it the day you serve it.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned after Crisco went on sale in 1911, and its recipes call for the new shortening in places a cook of the day would have reached for butter, lard or oil — including, as here, a salad dressing, where a tablespoon of solid fat does little but put the brand name at the top of the list. The dish itself is the standard American boiled dressing, an egg-and-vinegar custard that predates commercial mayonnaise and was the usual choice for fruit and cabbage salads in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lightening it with whipped cream was the genteel refinement of the type.