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April 12
Menu: Hollandaise Soup; Escalloped Potatoes Vegetable Pie; Celery Patties; Romaine Salad; Chocolate Tapioca; Coffee Hollandaise Soup-1 quart vegetable stock, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, 4 yolks eggs, 12 pint cream, 1/2 cup green peas, cooked, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup carrot, cut in small pieces, cooked, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1/2 cup cut cucumber, cooked, and 1 teaspoon chopped tarragon. peas. Trim peas, carrots and cucumbers with round cutter, size and shape of Cook them in boiling water, being careful not to cook them too much. Melt Crisco and flour in stewpan; add stock and let boil well. Break yolks of eggs into a basin and add cream, then add the liaison of eggs and cream to stock; let it just come to boil, being careful it does not curdle. Strain into a clean stewpan, add vegetables which have been previously cooked, and tarragon and serve.
A classic velvet soup — stock thickened with a roux, then enriched with an egg-and-cream liaison — garnished with three vegetables cut to the size of peas. The whole dish turns on the liaison, which must never boil.
- The hinge: the liaisonYolks beaten with cream will scramble the moment they pass roughly 180F. Temper them with a ladle of hot stock first, return the mixture to the pan off the heat, and bring it back only until it thickens and coats a spoon. The instruction to "let it just come to boil" is period phrasing for the point where the surface trembles; take it literally and the soup curdles.
- CriscoStill sold, and here it is simply the fat for the roux. Butter gives a better flavor in a soup finished with cream; use 4 tablespoons of either.
- Cream quantityThe cream measure has lost its fraction in this printing. A half pint (1 cup) is the standard proportion for a quart of stock with four yolks, and is what the balance of the recipe suggests.
- Vegetable stockThe recipe specifies only "vegetable stock", which in this period would generally have meant a light broth, closer to water than to commercial vegetable broth. Use a mild homemade stock or a diluted low-sodium one; assertive tomato- or yeast-heavy broths will fight the egg and cream.
- Cutting the garnishThe round cutter is a small plain pastry cutter used to punch the carrot and cucumber into pea-sized rounds so all three garnishes match. A melon baller or a 1/4-inch cutter does the same job; if the uniformity is not worth the labor, dice everything small and evenly.
- Cooking the vegetablesBoil them separately and briefly — peas 2 to 3 minutes, carrot rounds 4 to 5, cucumber barely 1 — then drain. They finish in the hot soup, and the warning against overcooking is the difference between a clean garnish and a cloudy one.
- TarragonFresh tarragon, chopped and added at the end so its anise note survives. Dried tarragon is much stronger and duller; use about a third of a teaspoon if that is all you have.
- StrainingStrain after the liaison goes in, before the garnish. This catches any threads of set yolk and is why the soup can be rescued even if it tightens slightly.
- YieldA quart of stock plus cream gives roughly six first-course servings of about 6 ounces each.
Despite the name, this is not hollandaise sauce thinned out; in the French repertoire that Crisco and other American cookbooks of the 1910s borrowed from, "à la hollandaise" attached to a soup meant a white velouté finished with a liaison of egg yolks and cream — the Dutch association generally traced to the richness of Dutch dairy rather than to any specific dish. The technique is the same one that gives sauce allemande and potage à la reine their body. Its appearance in a shortening company's book is deliberate: Procter & Gamble's Calendar of Dinners set out to show that Crisco could stand in for butter and lard anywhere, including in the delicate roux of a company soup, and each recipe was pinned to a date to sell the idea of a year of planned menus.