Home › Recipes › Escalloped Vegetables
Escalloped Vegetables
All cooked vegetables, which may be creamed, may also be escalloped. To do this, brush a baking-dish lightly with Snowdrift, turn in the vegetable mixed with the cream sauce -once the recipe for Cream or White Sauce No. 2 being sufficient for three cupfuls of the cooked vegetable-then sprinkle the dish with a half cupful of coarse bread crumbs, mixed with a tablespoonful of melted Snowdrift, and brown the whole in a hot oven, 375 degrees F. If desired, from a third to a half cupful of grated cheese may be strewn over the top, before baking, in addition to the crumbs.
Any of these vegetables may be reinforced with some sliced, hard-cooked eggs, which makes the escalloped vegetable sufficiently substantial to act as the main course at luncheon or supper.
A method rather than a fixed dish: any cooked vegetable plus a medium white sauce, crumbs, and a hot oven. The proportions are the useful part.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil vegetable shortening, sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company and heavily promoted through books like this one. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter is better tasting here, and the quantities involved are small.
- White Sauce No. 2The book's medium sauce. A medium white sauce of this period usually runs about 2 tablespoons fat and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup of milk, cooked together and then simmered until it coats a spoon, though the book's own proportions and yield are not given on this page. Whatever the quantity, one recipe of it is meant to dress three cupfuls of cooked vegetable -- deliberately a lean bound, not soupy.
- The oven numberThe text calls 375F a "hot oven," which by modern habit is moderate. Trust the number, not the adjective: 375F browns crumbs without the sauce breaking or boiling over the edges.
- Timing, which the recipe omitsEverything is already cooked, so you are only heating through and browning. Twenty to twenty-five minutes at 375F is enough for a shallow dish; if the top has not colored, finish under the broiler for a minute rather than leaving it in longer.
- Crumbs"coarse bread crumbs" refers to the size of the crumb rather than to a particular bread: torn or coarsely grated bread, not the fine sand sold in canisters. Coarse crumbs tossed with a tablespoon of melted fat crisp into distinct flakes; fine dry crumbs pack down.
- CheeseA third to a half cupful of grated cheese is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 ounces. A dry aged cheese -- Cheddar, Gruyere, Parmesan -- melts into the crumbs; fresh mozzarella-type cheeses release water into the sauce.
- Vegetables that suit itCauliflower, celery, onions, carrots, potatoes, cabbage and salsify all hold their shape. Drain them well and pat dry any cooking water left clinging will thin the sauce and pool under the crumbs.
- YieldThree cupfuls of vegetable with its sauce comes to roughly a quart and suits a 1 1/2-quart dish: four as a side, or fewer as the luncheon or supper main course the recipe itself suggests once sliced hard-cooked eggs are layered in.
"Escallop" and "scallop" are generally traced to the same word, from the shell: dishes were once baked and served in scallop shells, and the name is often said to have outlived the vessel to mean anything baked in a dish with sauce and crumbs. This book is a promotional cookbook Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening marketed in the early twentieth century, often presented as a clean, economical alternative to lard, and the brand name appears in place of the generic ingredient throughout, which is why the fat is specified for greasing the dish and buttering the crumbs. The entry's structure also reflects how home-economics writing of the period worked: a master sauce is numbered and taught once, then referred to by number in later recipes, so that a cook learned proportions rather than memorizing separate dishes. The closing suggestion of hard-cooked eggs to promote a vegetable side into a supper main course appears to be a thrift device of the era, when meatless luncheon and supper dishes were a matter of economy as much as taste.