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August 7
Menu: Grilled Trout Chicken Saute; Souffled Squash Potato Croquettes; French Salad Fruit Compote; Coffee Souffled Squash-Take medium-sized Hubbard squash, remove seeds and stringy portion, and pare. Place in steamer and cook over boiling water for 30 minutes. Mash and season with Crisco, salt and pepper to taste. To 2 cups of the mashed squash, add gradually 1 cup cream, when blended, yolks of 2 well beaten eggs, and finally the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs. Pour into Criscoed souffle dish and bake in moderate oven till firm. Serve at once.
A plain squash soufflé from the Crisco book's day-by-day dinner calendar, printed here under the coffee chapter heading. The original leaves the fat quantity, the pan size and the baking time to the cook's judgment; those are the gaps worth filling.
- Drain the squashHubbard is wet, and a steamed mash carries enough water to keep the soufflé from setting. After mashing, dry it over low heat for a few minutes, stirring, until it holds a shape on the spoon. This is the difference between a risen soufflé and a loose custard. A "moderate oven" of this period is generally read as about 350-375F; a dish of this size will probably need 40 to 50 minutes, and "till firm" means the centre barely trembles when the dish is nudged.
- Crisco quantitiesThe recipe names Crisco twice without measuring it. Two tablespoons in the mash is ample for 2 cups of squash, and a thin film brushed over the dish is all "Criscoed" asks for. Butter can be used instead, though it is not a like-for-like substitute for shortening.
- Dish sizeTwo cups of squash plus a cup of cream and two eggs fills a 1 1/2-quart soufflé dish about two-thirds full, which is what you want. Serves four as a side.
- CreamPeriod "cream" in a book like this probably means something nearer 18 to 20 percent butterfat than modern heavy cream at 36 percent. Light cream is the closest match; half-and-half is thinner still.
- Folding orderBeat the yolks into the warm, not hot, squash so they thicken without scrambling, then fold the whites in two additions with a light hand. Bake immediately -- a whipped-white soufflé with no starch or roux behind it deflates fast if it stands.
- Hubbard substitutesWhole Hubbards often run 8 to 15 lb and are not widely sold now. Other dense winter squash -- butternut, kabocha or buttercup -- can be peeled and steamed the same way, though they may be tender in less than the 30 minutes given here.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it; the recipes are largely conventional turn-of-the-century home cooking with lard and butter written out and Crisco written in. The Calendar of Dinners section assigned a full menu to every day of the year, which is why this squash soufflé carries the date August 8 -- though Hubbard squash is a keeper harvested in autumn and eaten through the winter, so the placement says more about the calendar's tidiness than about the market. Hubbard itself is an American heirloom, generally traced to seed distributed in Marblehead, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century, and was widely grown in New England when this book was written.