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August 5
Menu: Green Corn; Country Club Chicken; Sweet Potatoes; Tomato Salad Apple Whip; Chocolate Wafers Coffee Country Club Chicken-Wash 2 broilers or quite young chickens, cut them in halves or quarters if they be large enough, wipe them and dip each piece in beaten egg, well seasoned with salt and pepper and mixed with Roll pieces in breadcrumbs and place them in Criscoed pan, dot generously with Crisco and place in hot oven for 15 minutes. Now put chicken in hot kettle, cover and let smother and steam for 30 minutes or until tender on a slow fire. Place chicken on hot platter; add half cup hot cream to gravy in kettle and strain it over chickens. cream.
The page is a dinner menu with one worked recipe embedded in it, and the typesetting has suffered: the egg is "mixed with" something that never made it onto the page, and a stray "cream." floats at the end. The missing ingredient is almost certainly cream or milk, which is how the same dish is handled elsewhere in the period.
- The hinge: brown first, then smotherThe 15 minutes in the oven is purely for colour and crust; the 30 minutes covered over low heat is what cooks the bird. If you shorten the second stage the coating will look finished while the joints are still raw at the bone. Chicken is done at 165F at the thigh joint.
- BroilersA 1913 broiler is a very young bird of roughly 1 to 2 lb; the recipe halves or quarters it. Two of them serve about four. Modern equivalents are Cornish hens or a 3 to 3.5 lb chicken cut into eight pieces, which will likely need closer to 35-40 minutes smothered.
- "Hot oven"Take it as roughly 400-450F. Crisco stands heat better than butter, and the fat dotted over the crumbs is what sets the coating in that first quarter hour.
- Crisco and "Criscoed"This book is Procter & Gamble advertising copy, and "Criscoed" simply means greased. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works; butter will brown faster at 450F than the original shortening did.
- The missing liquidBeaten egg "well seasoned with salt and pepper and mixed with" — the text breaks off. The omitted words were most likely a few tablespoons of cream or milk, thinning the egg so the crumbs adhere in a thin layer rather than a paste. About 2 tablespoons per 2 eggs works.
- Two pans, or oneThe recipe moves the chicken from a roasting pan to a "hot kettle" — a heavy lidded pot. A single ovenproof Dutch oven does both jobs and keeps the browned fond for the gravy.
- The gravyHalf a cup of hot cream stirred into the pot drippings, then strained. There is no flour in it, so it stays thin — a pan sauce rather than a thickened gravy. Warm the cream first or it will break the fat out of the drippings.
The Story of Crisco (1913), by Marion Harris Neil, was written to teach American cooks what to do with a brand-new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shelf-stable, odourless stand-in for lard and butter. Procter & Gamble also issued a separate day-by-day menu book, A Calendar of Dinners, giving a full menu for every day of the year — a device often said to be common in early twentieth-century promotional cookbooks, since it made the tin look indispensable across the whole calendar rather than useful for one cake. "Country Club" style names attached to a good many dishes of the era and are usually taken to have signalled genteel rather than any fixed technique; here it dresses up the older country method of smothered chicken, which is browned and then steamed under a lid in its own fat and juices. The half cup of cream stirred into the drippings is the same finish used for smothered and fricasseed birds throughout nineteenth-century American cookery, and the bones of this recipe are considerably older than the shortening it was written to sell.