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Vegetable Pie
1/4 cupful melted Crisco 6 potatoes 2 carrots 1 parsnip 1/2 head celery 1 cupful peas 1 cupful sliced beans 2 onions 4 tomatoes Pepper and salt to taste Sufficient white vegetable stock to cover 1 teaspoonful powdered herbs Peel and slice potatoes and partly boil them. Then prepare parsnip, carrots, celery and onions, and cook them for fifteen minutes. Grease large fireproof dish and place in all vegetables in layers, with herbs, Crisco, salt and pepper to taste. Pour in white stock, cover with layer of sliced potatoes and bake in moderate oven for one and a half hours.
Sufficient for one large savory pie.
A crustless baked vegetable dish in the English style, where "pie" means a layered casserole capped with potato rather than pastry. Everything hinges on the liquid level and the parcooking.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. At an hour and a half the top potatoes should be browned and the parsnip and carrot fully tender; cover with foil if the top colours before the interior is done.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book was written to sell it. A quarter cup of butter, or olive oil, does the same job here and tastes better with root vegetables.
- Stock to cover, but not the lidAdd enough white vegetable stock to come up to the top layer of vegetables, not over the sliced potato crust. Submerged potatoes steam grey instead of browning. Roughly 2 to 3 cups depending on your dish.
- White vegetable stockA pale stock made from onion, celery, leek and carrot, kept free of browning so it stays light. Any unsalted vegetable broth works; avoid dark or tomato-heavy ones, which will muddy the colour.
- ParcookingPotatoes "partly boiled" means only briefly, perhaps five minutes from cold, still firm at the centre, so the crust slices hold their shape. The root vegetables and celery get the recipe's fifteen minutes; drain them well or the pie floods.
- Powdered herbsA period term for dried mixed herbs rubbed to a powder, typically thyme, marjoram, sage and parsley. A teaspoon of dried mixed herbs or herbes de Provence is the equivalent.
- Half a head of celeryA period head of celery was probably not the size of a modern supermarket bunch. Reckon on 4 to 5 stalks, sliced, rather than half of a modern bunch.
- The tomatoesFour tomatoes, sliced, go in as one of the layers; they release a good deal of liquid, so hold back on stock until they are in place.
- Yield"One large savory pie" in a 3-quart dish serves six to eight as a main course, and reheats well.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as a promotional cookbook for Crisco, which is why shortening appears in a dish of boiled roots that has no earthly need of it. The dish itself is older than the fat: a layered vegetable bake sealed under sliced potato belongs to the British and Irish tradition of savoury "pies" that carry no pastry at all. Parsnip, carrot, celery and onion in a pale stock is straight kitchen-garden cooking, and the recipe's appearance in an American book of the 1910s reflects both that inheritance and a period enthusiasm for meatless dinners, which was promoted in the household press before wartime rationing gave it official weight.