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Creamed Canned Meats or Fish
Salmon, lobster, crab meat, shrimp, chicken, or dried beef may be used with one can of peas as follows: 2 tbsp. of butter and 1 of flour. When melted and blended, add gradually 1 cup of milk. Stir until smooth and thick. 1/4 tsp. salt and dash of cayenne pepper. Serve on saltines.
— Mrs. Albert Tattersall
A Cheap Meat About 31/2 to 4 lbs. shin bone. Boil three hours or more until tender. Cut several 1/2 inch slices from meat, saute in butter to brown and make gravy by taking about 1 cup of broth and add to butter and flour in pan. Pour over meat.
The balance of meat and broth may be made into a stew with potatoes, onion and carrot sliced in it. Or, the part left may be made into jellied meat by adding to broth gelatine sufficient to jelly four cupfulls. This is more than the broth usually amounts to, but like to make it very stiff. Pour over the meat which has been chopped fine and salt and pepper added, and allowed to jell. Very fine for hot summer days.
— Zelida Ayres Betterley
Steak en Casserole Take 1½ lbs. of round steak, cut in pieces for serving, salt and pepper and roll in flour. Place in casserole, dust with flour, then pare and slice two good sized onions. Sprinkle on about twelve cloves. Add another layer of meat, dust with flour and cover with cold water. Cover tightly and bake two hours.
— Mrs. I. Tunison
Three contributed recipes run together on one page, all of them shorthand written for cooks who already knew what they were doing. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The missing step in the creamed dishThe method describes only the white sauce. Once it is smooth and thick, fold in the drained can of peas and the flaked salmon, crab, shrimp, diced chicken or shredded dried beef, and heat through without boiling. The recipe gives no quantity for the meat or fish and no yield.
- Sauce proportionsTwo tablespoons butter to one of flour makes a loose roux, and with a cup of milk it will be closer to pourable than to the "smooth and thick" the recipe promises. Two tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of milk gives the familiar medium white sauce if you want it to hold on a cracker.
- Dried beefThe chipped or dried beef of this period was salt-cured and sold by the sliver. It is still available in jars. Rinse and taste before adding the quarter teaspoon of salt, or the sauce will be inedible.
- Shin boneBeef shin, the foreleg, sold now as shank or osso buco cut. A three-to-four-pound bone-in piece will yield rather less than half its weight in meat, plus a strongly gelatinous broth, which is the point of the cut.
- The gelatine"Sufficient to jelly four cupfuls" is about two envelopes of powdered gelatine, roughly half an ounce, at the usual rate of one envelope per two cups. She then puts it into less broth than that, which is how it comes out stiff enough to slice, as she says herself. Shin broth is already gelatin-rich, so test a spoonful on a cold saucer before committing. Chill the jellied meat promptly and keep it refrigerated.
- "Casserole" in the steak recipeA covered earthenware or enamelled baking dish, not the American baked-noodle sense of the word. A lidded Dutch oven does the same work.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Two hours covered for floured round steak points to a moderate oven, 325-350F; the flour dusted between layers thickens the water into gravy as it cooks.
- Twelve clovesThat is a forceful amount of clove for a pound and a half of beef and reflects a taste for heavily spiced pot meats. Six is plenty for most modern palates, and whole cloves are easier to fish out than ground.
The three recipes together sketch what a contributed community cookbook was for: not showpiece cookery but the daily problem of feeding a household cheaply. The creamed dish belongs to the era when canned salmon, shrimp and peas had become reliably available and inexpensive, and a white sauce on a cracker or piece of toast was a common American way of stretching a single can into supper. "A Cheap Meat" is the same thrift at work on the butcher's counter: one tough shin bone is worked through three separate meals, ending as jellied meat, a cold dish of the kind that suited a cool cellar or an icebox. The steak en casserole, layered with onion and clove and left to bake for two hours, is a slow-oven recipe. All three are signed by their contributors, the defining format of the community cookbook, which was typically sold to raise funds and preserved the everyday cooking of named women who otherwise left no written record.