Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Scalloped Pumpkin and Rice
Scalloped Pumpkin and Rice
In Criscoed fireproof dish arrange layer of stewed pumpkin, cover with layer of boiled rice, then layer of white sauce, proceed until ingredients are used. Cover with crumbs, dot with Crisco and bake until browned on top. To cook pumpkin, cut in two, scrape out the interior, pare and cut into small pieces. Steam and cook till tender. Rub through a sieve, add 2 tablespoons Crisco, season with salt, pepper, and paprika.
A layered gratin from a book written to sell shortening, so the method is complete but the quantities and the oven are left to the cook. Two things are unstated and both matter: the white sauce and the temperature.
- White sauceThe book assumes you know it: 2 tablespoons fat, 2 tablespoons flour, and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and a scrape of nutmeg. For a dish of this size, 2 cups of sauce is about right; any less and the rice layers stay dry.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Everything is already cooked, so this is a browning job: 375F for 25-30 minutes, or 350F for 40 if you want the layers to settle together.
- CriscoStraight shortening works but tastes of nothing. Butter for the sauce, the crumbs and the dots on top is a clear improvement.
- The pumpkinUse a sugar or pie pumpkin, not a carving pumpkin, which is watery and bland. Butternut squash is a better modern stand-in than either. Canned pumpkin works if it is plain puree with no sugar or pie spice.
- Drain it hardSteamed pumpkin holds a great deal of water, and this is the hinge of the dish. After sieving, dry the puree in a wide pan over moderate heat, stirring, until it mounds on the spoon; otherwise the layers slump into orange soup under the crumbs.
- RiceAbout 1 cup raw long-grain, boiled and drained, gives roughly 3 cups cooked, which is enough for two or three layers. Slightly undercook it, since it will absorb sauce in the oven.
- "Fireproof dish"Any 2-quart ceramic or glass baking dish. The term distinguished ovenproof earthenware from ordinary table china, which cracked.
- YieldServes four as a main course with a green salad, six as a side. It reheats well and is better the second day, once the layers have set.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble as a promotional cookbook for Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company introduced in 1911; the recipes are built around the product, and the verb "to Crisco" a dish appears throughout as though it were ordinary English. Layered scallops of this kind, alternating a cooked vegetable, a starch and a cream sauce under buttered crumbs, were a mainstay of American meatless cookery long before the book, and pumpkin was a natural candidate: cheap, abundant in autumn, and commonly treated as a vegetable as well as a dessert filling. The pairing with rice reflects the period's interest in "complete" meatless dinners, an idea pushed hard by domestic-science writers and, later and for different reasons, by wartime food conservation campaigns.