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Snow Souffle
Put 2 tablespoons Crisco and 4 tablespoons potato flour in pan, stir well together, add 1/2 cup milk, pinch salt, and stir till boiling. Remove from fire, add 4 tablespoons sugar, yolks 3 eggs 1 by 1, 1/2 teaspoon orange flower water, and fold in stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Pour into Criscoed souffle mold, put greased paper round. Bake for 20 minutes in moderate oven. Serve at once.
Summer Squash--Cut summer squashes into small pieces and boil till tender in salted water. Put into a clean towel and wring out all water. Put squashes into saucepan and add to each cup of them, 2 tablespoons cream and 1/2 tablespoon Crisco. Heat thoroughly before sending to table.
Two dishes run together here: a sweet soufflé and a plain buttered squash. The soufflé is a classic pastry-cream base lightened with whipped whites, and it behaves like one — the batter will not wait.
- Potato flour is potato starchWhat the book calls potato flour is the fine white starch sold today as potato starch, not the coarser potato flour milled from whole dried potato. Four tablespoons of starch to half a cup of milk gives a very stiff paste; that stiffness is deliberate, since it carries the whites.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Any neutral solid shortening works, and unsalted butter gives better flavour in a dessert — 2 tablespoons is about 1 oz.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature. 'Moderate' is conventionally read today as around 350F/175C. Bake on a low rack with nothing above it, and do not open the door for the first 15 minutes.
- The hinge: fold and goBeat the whites to firm but not dry peaks, slacken the warm base with a spoonful of them, then fold the rest in with as few strokes as will combine it. The starch base sets fast as it cools; a batter that sits on the counter loses its lift and bakes dense.
- Yolks one by oneThe instruction matters. Add each yolk to the hot base off the heat and stir it fully in before the next, or the eggs scramble in the starch.
- The greased paper roundMost likely a collar of paper tied around the outside of the mould, standing above the rim so the souffle can rise past the dish, though the phrase could also mean a round of greased paper laid in or over it. A 1 to 1.5 quart straight-sided dish, buttered and dusted with sugar, suits this quantity.
- Orange flower waterStill sold, usually in Middle Eastern groceries. Modern distillates vary in strength; start with a quarter teaspoon and taste the base before folding, as a heavy hand turns it soapy.
- Yield and servingServes three or four, and "serve at once" is not a flourish — it begins to sink within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
- The squashWringing boiled summer squash in a towel is the whole point of that recipe; the vegetable is largely water and will otherwise flood the cream. Salting the cut pieces and draining them before cooking works as well and is less scalding.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which introduced Crisco — hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a shortening — in 1911. Books like this were part of the company's advertising, alongside its periodical campaigns: a year of menus in which dish after dish took Crisco, including, as here, a dessert soufflé and a dish of buttered squash. The soufflé itself is older and French in method, a starch-thickened crème pâtissière loosened with yolks and raised with whites; potato starch rather than wheat flour gives a lighter, cleaner-tasting base and was common in period pastry work. Orange flower water, distilled from bitter orange blossom, was one of a number of sweet flavourings current in English and American kitchens — alongside vanilla, rosewater and lemon — which is why it turns up in a 1910s book without comment.