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Savory Potatoes
Pare 10 large potatoes and slice them, add 1 chopped onion. Crisco pudding dish, put in potatoes and onion, sprinkle with salt and pepper, 1 teaspoon sage and dot with Crisco, add 1 cup water and bake for 1 1/4 hours.
A scalloped potato without the cream, from a cookbook written to sell shortening. The instructions assume a cook who already knows her oven; the gaps are worth filling in.
- "Crisco" as a verbThe book uses its sponsor's name as a verb to mean grease the dish, and then as a plain noun for the fat you dot on top. Any solid fat or oil works; butter gives a better flavour here, since there is nothing else in the dish but potato, onion and sage.
- Pudding dishA deep, straight-sided earthenware or glass baking dish. Ten large potatoes, sliced, make a lot of bulk, so use the largest deep baker you have, or divide between two dishes.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal. Bake at 350F; at that heat 1 1/4 hours is realistic for potatoes sliced about 1/8 inch thick.
- Cover for most of the timeOne cup of water is not much liquid for ten potatoes, and it will boil away in an uncovered dish long before the middle is tender. Cover with foil or a lid for the first hour, then uncover to brown the top.
- Slice thin and evenlyThis is the hinge. Thick or uneven slices leave you with crisp edges and raw centres, since there is no cream or sauce to conduct heat through the layers.
- SageA teaspoon of dried rubbed sage is meant, not fresh. Dried sage is assertive and slightly bitter in quantity; a scant teaspoon is safer for modern palates, or use about a tablespoon chopped fresh.
- PotatoesA starchy or all-purpose potato — russet or Yukon Gold — softens into the liquid and thickens it. Waxy salad potatoes stay separate and the dish reads as watery.
- YieldTen large potatoes is a great deal of food: eight to ten servings as a side dish. Halve it for a family of four.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the branded cookbook, written by a professional cookery author and given away or sold cheaply to promote a single product. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911 and needed teaching as much as selling, since American cooks were accustomed to butter and lard; the recipes accordingly work the brand name into the method itself, so that greasing a dish becomes "Crisco the pudding dish." The dish itself is a plain scalloped potato of the sort that predates the book by generations — potatoes, onion, fat and a little water, baked slowly until the starch thickens what liquid remains. Sage as the seasoning points to the English and Anglo-American tradition of pairing it with pork and with potatoes; it is the same herb that flavours sausage, and it does a good deal of work in a dish with no meat in it.