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April 10
Menu: Puree of Black Beans; Baked Macaroni; Cabbage Salad; Cheese Puffs; Potato Puff; Spice Jelly, Whipped Cream; Coffee Potato Puff-Prepare 21/2 cups hot mashed potato. Add 3/4 cup milk, 2 well-beaten yolks of eggs, 3 tablespoons Crisco, and salt and pepper to taste. Beat this well, then add beaten whites of 2 eggs. Pile lightly in Criscoed baking dish and bake until puffed and brown.
A soufflé-style potato dish from the Crisco book's day-by-day dinner calendar, where it appears as a side note under an April supper. The original gives no oven temperature and no time, both of which need filling in.
- OvenBake at 375-400F for 25 to 35 minutes, until well risen and browned on top. Take it out while the centre is still soft; baked much beyond that it will be drier and will settle more as it cools.
- CriscoThe 1913 product was a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening. Current Crisco works, and so does an equal amount of butter, which improves the flavour considerably here.
- "Criscoed" dishThis simply means greased. Grease a 1 1/2-quart baking or soufflé dish generously; the mixture climbs the sides as it puffs.
- The hingeBeat the whites to soft, not stiff, peaks and fold them in rather than beating them through, as the wording invites. Overbeaten or stirred whites give a dense, damp puff instead of a light one.
- PotatoUse a starchy baking potato, riced or mashed while hot and dry. Waxy or gluey potato will not hold air. About 1 1/4 lb of potatoes gives 2 1/2 cups mashed.
- Temperature of the baseLet the potato-milk-yolk mixture cool to warm before folding in the whites. Hot potato slackens the foam on contact.
- Seasoning"Salt and pepper to taste" is easy to underdo in a potato dish; season the base assertively before the whites go in, since you cannot taste it afterwards.
- Yield and timingServes four to six as a side dish. It will settle somewhat as it cools, so aim to have it come out of the oven near serving time.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a new all-vegetable shortening; the day-by-day "Calendar of Dinners" format, giving a menu for every day of the year with small recipes tucked in beside the date, belongs to the company's calendar-of-dinners publication rather than to The Story of Crisco proper, and the two are easily conflated. Potato puff belongs to a family of American baked potato dishes found in nineteenth-century household cookery, where enriched mashed potato lightened with beaten egg whites was a familiar way to turn a plain vegetable into something fit for a company table. Its presence here is commercial as much as culinary: three tablespoons of Crisco in the potato and more for greasing the dish demonstrated that the new fat could stand in for butter and lard in the same recipe, which was precisely the argument the book existed to make.