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August 31
Menu: Bisque of Clams and Peas; Stuffed Peppers; Cheese Salad; Toasted Crackers; Lemon Sherbet Whipped Cream; Coffee Cheese Salad-To 1 cup cooked chopped chicken, add 1/2 pound soft American cheese and 1/2 cup pickled chopped cauliflower. Rub through sieve, yolks of 2 hard-cooked eggs, add 1 teaspoon French mustard, 4 tablespoons melted Crisco, 3 tablespoons vinegar, red pepper, paprika, and salt to taste. Pour this sauce over salad and garnish with whites of eggs cut in slices and branches of pickled cauliflower.
A chopped chicken and cheese salad bound with a sieved-yolk dressing, written to demonstrate Crisco in a cold application. The dressing is the part that needs rethinking.
- The hinge: melted shortening in a cold saladCrisco is solid at room temperature, so a dressing built on four tablespoons of it can set into flecks of grease when it meets chilled chicken and cheese. If you want the original texture, have every component at room temperature and dress at the last second; a neutral oil or a light olive oil in the same quantity is the easy substitution.
- Soft American cheeseIn 1913 this most likely meant a young, mild factory cheddar sold soft, not the wrapped processed slices the phrase now suggests. A half pound of mild cheddar or a young Colby, diced small, is the closest match.
- French mustardA smooth prepared mustard of the Dijon type, not the bright yellow American kind. One teaspoon is modest against a half pound of cheese; taste and add more.
- Pickled cauliflowerPut up at home or bought from the grocer then, and still available in jars or as the cauliflower picked out of a jar of giardiniera. Drain it well or the vinegar in the dressing will compound.
- The sieved yolksPushing two hard-cooked yolks through a sieve is what thickens the dressing and helps hold it together in place of raw egg. Do not skip it or shortcut it in a blender with the whites; the whites are wanted whole for the garnish.
- "Branches" of cauliflowerSimply the intact florets, kept back from the chopping for the top of the dish.
- YieldAbout four side servings, or two as a lunch salad. The proportions assume the chicken is already cooked and cooled, so it suits leftover roast chicken.
- Reading the pageThe lines after the recipe are not part of it. "September 1: Cauliflower Soup, Roast Beef, Brown Gravy" is the start of the next day's menu in the book's dinner calendar.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product that had no place in any existing kitchen tradition. The book's strategy was to show the fat everywhere at once, which is why it turns up here in a cold salad dressing where lard would have been unthinkable and butter merely unusual; the argument being made is that one tin can replace every other fat in the house. The "Calendar of Dinners" section that frames this recipe gave a full menu for every day of the year, a common device in early twentieth-century American cookbooks aimed at the middle-class housekeeper planning without a cook. The salad itself belongs to a large family of period dishes built on cooked chicken, sharp pickle and a sieved-yolk dressing, the sort of thing that used up Sunday's roast and appeared on the table cold.