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April 30
Menu: Pepper Pot; Mutton Cutlets, Tomato Sauce; New Potatoes; Lima Beans; Sliced Tomato Salad; Cheese Fingers Violet Mousse; Coffee Pepper Pot-A small knuckle of veal, 1 pound cooked tripe, 1 onion, 2 medium-sized potatoes, 1 bunch pot herbs, 1 cup Crisco, 3 quarts cold water. more. Wash veal and pot herbs and slice onion, put them with water, in soup kettle, on back of stove, where they will come gradually to boiling point. Allow to simmer 4 hours or Strain and set away to cool. This must be done day before it is wanted. When cold, skim off every particle of fat, add to it potatoes, cut in small cubes, tripe, cut in 1/2 inch squares, bay leaf, few sprigs parsley chopped fine, and meat cut from knuckle, rejecting every bit of fat and gristle. Put them on to boil just long enough before dinner to cook potatoes; when boiling, season to taste with with salt and red pepper. Thicken soup with one teaspoon each flour and cornstarch mixed smooth with little water. Mix Crisco with 1 cup flour, 1½ teaspoon salt and little pepper, and enough cold water to make dough stiff enough to roll out, cut in small squares and boil in soup 1/2 hour.
A two-day soup: veal stock one day, assembly the next. The Crisco here does double duty as the book's selling point and as the fat in the dumplings, but a full cup for one cup of flour is far more than any dumpling needs.
- The dumpling ratio is wrongOne cup of shortening to one cup of flour will not form a rollable dough; it makes a paste. Traditional pepper pot dumplings use roughly 2 to 4 tablespoons of fat per cup of flour. Scale the Crisco down and add cold water a spoonful at a time.
- Knuckle of vealThe lower leg joint, sold today as veal shank or osso buco cut. Ask for it cut across so the marrow and gelatin come out; about 1½ to 2 lb gives enough meat to pick and enough body to set the stock. Beef shank works if veal is unavailable, though the broth will be darker.
- Pot herbsA "bunch of pot herbs" was a bundle of soup vegetables and herbs sold for the kettle; the mix varied, but typically carrot, turnip, celery with leaves and parsley, sometimes leek or parsnip. Two carrots, two celery stalks, a small turnip and a few parsley stems is a reasonable equivalent.
- TripeHoneycomb tripe sold today is cleaned and bleached but rarely fully cooked. Simmer it separately until tender, an hour and a half to two hours, before dicing, or it stays leathery in the short final boil.
- Back of the stoveThe cool end of a coal range, where a pot held just below a simmer. On a modern hob that is the lowest setting with the lid ajar. Bringing stock up slowly and never letting it boil hard is what keeps it clear.
- Cooling the stockThe instruction to set it away overnight assumes a cold larder. Chill the strained stock quickly in a shallow pan, then refrigerate; the fat lifts off in a solid sheet the next morning, which is exactly what the recipe wants.
- Red pepperCayenne, and it is the point of the dish. Pepper pot should be assertively hot. Start with ¼ teaspoon in three quarts and build.
- Timing at the endThe potatoes need about 15 minutes; the dumplings are given half an hour, which is generous but not damaging for a suet-style dough. Add the dumplings first, potatoes after, and keep the pot at a bare simmer so the dumplings do not break up.
- YieldThree quarts of stock, reduced a little, serves 8 to 10 as a first course or 6 as a main.
Pepper pot is Philadelphia's civic soup, and it was sold in the city's streets and markets well into the twentieth century by vendors whose cry, "Pepper pot, smoking hot," is well attested in the city. The dish is generally traced to West Indian and West African cookery, brought north through the Caribbean trade, where a heavily peppered stew of tripe and root vegetables was long established; the popular story that a Continental Army cook invented it at Valley Forge is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco under a dated calendar of dinners shows how Procter & Gamble marketed its new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in 1913: not as a novelty but as a drop-in replacement inside recipes cooks already knew, here standing where lard or suet would have gone in the dumplings.