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April 8
Menu: Red Pottage; Boudins of Ham with Peas; Roast Ribs of Beef Yorkshire Pudding; Potatoes; Cauliflower; Chiffonade Salad; Rhubarb Tart and Custard; Coffee Red Pottage-1/2 a pound dried beans, 1 teacup tomato puree, 1 beet, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 onions, piece of celery, 1 small piece of parsnip, 2 quarts good stock. Put Crisco in saucepan then add onions, celery and parsnip; cook a little, do not let it get very brown, then add dried beans, tomato puree; sliced beet and add pepper and salt to taste and then stock, and boil till all is tender. Rub through a fine sieve, reheat and Put sweetbreads on very thin slices of round toast and serve with this puree poured over all: Chop 1 dozen fresh mushrooms and put them to cook with 12 pint of cream and 1/2 cup fine breadcrumbs. Cook them in double boiler till mushrooms can be pressed through rather fine sieve. Return this puree to fire, April 9 season with salt and white pepper, and let get as hot as possible before using it for sweetbreads.
Legible here is a bean-and-beetroot purée soup thickened by its own vegetables and coloured by the beet. It is straightforward once the beans and the sieving are handled sensibly.
- Soak the beans firstHalf a pound of dried beans (about 1 cup, most likely white haricot or navy) needs an overnight soak or a quick soak, then it will still want 60-90 minutes of simmering in the stock. The recipe's "boil till all is tender" is governed entirely by the beans, not the root vegetables.
- Keep the beet out of the early fryThe instruction to cook the onion, celery and parsnip in the fat without letting it brown is the hinge. Brown them and the finished purée turns muddy brown rather than the clear red the name depends on. The sliced beet goes in later with the liquid.
- A teacupPeriod American books are inconsistent about the teacup, reckoning it anywhere from about half a cup to three-quarters of a cup (roughly 120-175 ml). A standard small tin of tomato pura is close enough.
- Crisco and its substitutesTwo tablespoons of vegetable shortening; butter or a neutral oil behaves the same way here. Crisco was new in 1911 and this book exists to show it doing everything animal fat did.
- StockTwo quarts is about 1.9 litres, and "good stock" means a well-made meat stock; the recipe does not say which. Keep it unsalted enough that you can season at the end: season lightly at the start as directed, then correct after sieving, since reducing concentrates the salt.
- SievingRubbing two quarts of beans and root vegetables through a fine sieve by hand is real work. A blender or stick blender followed by a single pass through a sieve gives the same smooth purée in a fraction of the time.
- YieldTwo quarts of stock plus vegetables makes roughly eight to ten first-course servings. It thickens noticeably on standing and will want thinning with more stock when reheated.
"Red pottage" is the dish Esau sold his birthright for in Genesis, where it is a lentil stew, and the name was later used loosely in English cookery for thick red-brown vegetable soups. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco is telling: the book was issued by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to promote Crisco, launched in 1911 as the first hydrogenated all-vegetable shortening sold in America, and the dates scattered through these pages indicate recipes arranged as a calendar of dinners, so that a housekeeper could see the new fat doing the ordinary daily work of butter, lard and suet. A soup that begins by sweating vegetables in two tablespoons of fat is a small demonstration piece. Procter & Gamble did advertise Crisco to Jewish households as an all-vegetable fat, though this particular soup is built on two quarts of meat stock.