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April 2
Menu: Emergency Soup; Veal Pot Pie Baked Dumplings; Cheese; Cabbage Salad; Crackers; Fruit Jelly, Whipped Cream; Coffee Veal Pot Pie-Wipe piece of veal from shoulder; and cut into pieces for serving; add ½ inch strip salt pork or bacon for each piece of veal, cover with cold water, put over fire and bring quickly to boiling point, then, after boiling five minutes, skim and let simmer until meat is tender. When nearly tender, add salt and pepper to taste, and biscuit mixture cut into rounds. Cook ten minutes without lifting cover. Serve meat in center of platter, dumplings at ends and sauce, thickened, if needed, with flour and water, over whole. Dumplings may be steamed 15 minutes over saucepan boiling water. This is usually preferable, to avoid removing them from fire until instant of serving. Beaten yolks of 2 eggs, diluted with 1/2 cup cream and added to sauce, gives a richer dish. Biscuit mixture is made as follows: Sift 1 quart good flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt, putting it through sifter 2 or 3 times. Rub into flour 1 large tablespoon Crisco and add sufficient sweet milk to make dough as soft as can be rolled and cut. Roll about 3/4 inch thick, cut with round biscuit cutter.
A straightforward braise-and-dumpling supper from Crisco's dated dinner calendar. The meat instructions are sound; the biscuit dough as written is under-leavened and under-fatted by modern standards.
- The hinge: keep the lid downDumplings dropped onto the stew cook by trapped steam, so lifting the cover in the first ten minutes collapses them into gluey lumps. If you want to check anything, use the steamer method the recipe offers, which lets you hold the dumplings until service.
- Cut and timingVeal shoulder in serving pieces needs 1½ to 2 hours at a bare simmer, not the vague "until tender." The bones and connective tissue there are what give the sauce body, so buy it bone-in if you can.
- "Wipe" the meatPeriod shorthand for wiping the surface with a damp cloth rather than rinsing. Patting dry with paper towel is the modern equivalent and matters here only because you are starting in cold water.
- 1 quart flourFlour was measured by volume, sifted: about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb. Sifting two or three times is not fussiness, it is how you get even leavening from a very small amount of baking powder.
- Leavening is lowTwo teaspoons baking powder per quart of flour is roughly a third of what current biscuit practice uses. Doughs of the period were expected to be denser; expect heavy dumplings unless you increase it to roughly 1 tablespoon per 2 cups flour.
- One tablespoon of shorteningThis is a lean dough by design, meant to absorb sauce rather than flake. A "large tablespoon" probably indicates a heaping rather than a level spoonful, but it is still far less fat than a biscuit recipe of the same flour weight would carry today.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabber many households also kept. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- The egg-yolk enrichmentYolks beaten with cream will curdle if stirred into boiling liquid. Pull the sauce off the heat, temper the yolk mixture with a ladle of hot sauce first, then return it and hold below a simmer.
- YieldThe full quart of biscuit dough makes far more than one pot needs, enough dumplings for eight to ten servings. Halve it for a 2 to 3 lb shoulder feeding four to six, or bake the surplus as biscuits.
Pot pie in this period did not necessarily mean pastry: through the 19th and early 20th centuries an American "pot pie" was often exactly this, meat stewed in a pot with a biscuit or dumpling crust cooked on top of the liquid, a lineage generally traced to English suet-crust boiled puddings and to Pennsylvania German bot boi, which uses noodle squares rather than dough rounds. Veal shoulder was a cheap, gelatinous cut in an era when calves were slaughtered young as a by-product of dairying, and the strip of salt pork tucked beside each piece supplies the fat that lean veal lacks. The recipe comes from Procter & Gamble's Crisco cookery, published from 1913 onward to persuade cooks that its new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could stand in for lard and butter everywhere, and the "Calendar of Dinners" material assigned a full menu to every day of the year so that Crisco appeared in the household routine rather than in a single novelty dish. Here it does the work lard would have done in the biscuit dough.