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August 25
Menu: Barley Broth; Mutton Souffle; Sweet Corn Creamed Carrots and Peas; Peach Cobbler; Coffee Peach Cobbler-Sift 1/2 cups flour and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder. With tips of fingers work into flour 1 tablespoon Crisco, and when well mixed add ½ cup milk. Peel and slice 4 peaches, and mix with 3/4 cup sugar and 2 tablespoons melted Crisco. In bottom of baking dish invert a cup, around this arrange peaches, and over all place dough patted out to about 3/4 of an inch in thickness. Bake in moderate oven until crust is brown and peaches are tender. This will require about 40 minutes. The cup keeps dough from lying on fruit and becoming soaked with juice.
A plain biscuit-dough cobbler from the Crisco promotional cookbook, with one genuinely clever structural trick. Note that the fractions in the first line have been mangled in printing and need reconstructing before you start.
- The measurementsThe printed page reads 1½ cups flour and 1½ teaspoons baking powder, as our text now gives. Add a pinch of salt, which the original omits.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F; the book gives no figure. At that heat the biscuit crust and the fruit come together in roughly the 40 minutes stated; if the top is browning before the peaches soften, tent it with foil.
- The inverted cupThis is the hinge of the recipe. A heatproof teacup or small ramekin set upside down in the centre props the dough clear of the bubbling juice so the underside steams rather than turns to paste — as the recipe itself explains, it "keeps dough from lying on fruit and becoming soaked with juice." Use ovenproof china or metal, not a modern thin mug.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, first sold in 1911 and the whole reason this book exists. The current product is reformulated to remove trans fats but behaves the same in a biscuit dough. Butter or lard substitutes one for one, with better flavour.
- Working in the fatOne tablespoon of shortening to 1 1/2 cups flour is a very lean dough by modern standards — closer to a dumpling than a biscuit. Three to four tablespoons gives a shorter, flakier crust if you want one.
- The peachesFour peaches is roughly 1 1/4 lb, which suits a dish of about 1 1/2 quarts. Three-quarters of a cup of sugar is heavy for ripe summer fruit; cut it to a half cup and add a squeeze of lemon. Freestone peaches slice far more easily than clingstone.
- PeelingScore a cross in the base, drop into boiling water for 30 to 45 seconds, then into ice water — the skins slip off. Underripe peaches resist this and are better pared with a knife.
- YieldServes about four. Best eaten warm, within an hour or two of baking, while the crust is still crisp on top.
This comes from A Calendar of Dinners, one of the titles under which Procter & Gamble issued its Crisco cookbook, a book written to persuade American cooks to give up lard and butter for a new hydrogenated cottonseed oil product. Every recipe in it is an argument, which is why a tablespoon of Crisco turns up in a cobbler dough where a nineteenth-century cook would simply have used butter. The dish itself is older than the book by a long way: the cobbler, a deep dish of sweetened fruit under a biscuit or dumpling topping, is generally traced to British settlers improvising a pie without a proper pastry-lined tin or a suitable oven. The inverted cup is a piece of practical kitchen engineering: it does the job of holding the crust up out of the juice.