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January 21
Menu: Cream of Lettuce Soup; Roast Shoulder of Mutton, Caper Sauce; Mashed Potatoes Baked Squash; Celery Salad Cheese Wafers; Apple Tapioca Coffee Cream of Lettuce Soup-3 cups white stock, 2 heads lettuce, 2 tablespoons cooked rice, 1/2 cup cream, 14 tablespoon onion, finely chopped, 1 tablespoon Crisco, yolk 1 egg, nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste. Remove outer leaves from lettuce and shred it. Cook onion 5 minutes in Crisco, add lettuce, rice, and stock. Add cream, yolk egg slightly beaten, nutmeg, salt, and pepper to taste.
A thin, quick soup from the book's day-by-day dinner calendar, written in the compressed style those calendars used — several steps are implied rather than stated. A few things need filling in before it works on a modern stove.
- The hinge: the egg yolkBeat the yolk with the cream, then temper the mixture with a ladle of hot soup before it goes into the pot, and keep the soup below a simmer afterwards. Boiling after the yolk goes in will curdle it into threads.
- "14 tablespoon onion"Garbled in the text as printed or transcribed. It may stand for 1/4 tablespoon or for 1 tablespoon; either amount is reasonable for three cups of stock, and a tablespoon of finely chopped onion is the safer guess for flavour.
- White stockA light, unbrowned stock — veal or chicken made from unroasted bones, with no tomato or dark vegetables. A mild low-sodium chicken stock stands in; season at the end, since the recipe adds salt only at that point.
- CriscoThe book's reason for existing. One tablespoon of any neutral shortening or oil works, and butter works better here, since the fat is only sweating an onion.
- Missing simmering timeThe instruction jumps from adding lettuce, rice and stock straight to finishing. Simmer the lettuce in the stock about 10 to 15 minutes, until it is fully collapsed and the rice has softened further.
- Whether to puréeWhether to purée -- Period "cream of" soups were often pressed through a sieve before the cream and yolk went in, and blending gives a smoother, paler result; leaving it unblended produces a broth with shreds of lettuce in it.
- Lettuce choiceTwo heads of a loose butterhead or leaf lettuce is the likelier reading than two dense iceberg heads. Romaine or butterhead gives roughly the right volume; note that the recipe has you discard the outer leaves.
- YieldThree cups of stock plus half a cup of cream makes about four small first-course servings.
Procter & Gamble promoted the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening it had introduced in 1911 through cookbooks of its own, and one of them carried a "Calendar of Dinners" that assigned a full menu to every day of the year — a format that flattered the housekeeper's planning while ensuring Crisco appeared in something on each page. Lettuce soup itself is much older than the tin: French cookery had long treated lettuce as a stewing vegetable rather than strictly a salad green, and a potage of shredded lettuce thickened with rice and finished with egg yolk was a familiar dish. The January date is a reminder of how differently the book's readers ate: hothouse and shipped lettuce existed by 1913, but a midwinter dinner of lettuce soup was a small luxury rather than an obvious choice.