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January 20
Menu: Clam Chowder; Rolled Beefsteak, Peanut Butter Sauce; Succotash; Boiled Onions; Cream Cheese and Pimiento Salad; Baked Custard Lady Fingers; Black Coffee; Cream Cheese and Pimiento Salad-; Wash and dry 1 can pimientoes. Fill; them with creamed cheese. Chill,; slice and serve on crisp lettuce leaves; with following dressing: Mix 1½ table-; spoon salt, 1/2 tablespoon mustard, 3/4; tablespoon sugar, and 1 tablespoon; flour, and when thoroughly blended,; add 2 egg yolks, slightly beaten, 3; tablespoons melted Crisco, 3/4 cup; milk, and 1/4 cup vinegar. Cook in; double boiler, stirring constantly, until; mixture thickens. Strain and cool.
A stuffed-pimiento salad with a cooked ("boiled") dressing. The dressing is the real work; the salad itself is assembly and chilling.
- The salt is almost certainly a misprintThe salt figure looks wrong as printed: one and a half tablespoons in about a cup of dressing would be inedible, and a teaspoon measure is the likelier reading. Season a small batch by taste rather than trusting the figure as printed.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and here it simply stands in for melted butter or oil. Three tablespoons of any neutral oil, or melted butter, gives the same body.
- "Creamed cheese"Cream cheese beaten smooth, not a separate product. Bring it to room temperature and work it until it will pipe or spoon into the pepper without tearing it.
- Canned pimientosThese are whole peeled roasted sweet red peppers packed in brine, sold in jars today. They are fragile; drain them, pat dry inside and out, and fill with a small spoon or a piping bag.
- SlicingChill the filled peppers at least two hours, until the cheese is firm, then cut crosswise with a thin sharp knife. Cut warm and the filling smears.
- Cooking the dressingKeep the water below a simmer and stir without stopping. A yolk-and-flour mixture of this kind thickens somewhere around 170-180F; much hotter and the eggs curdle. Straining, as the recipe directs, catches any lumps or curd.
- VinegarA quarter cup of ordinary cider or white vinegar suits a 5 percent product. Add it with the milk as directed rather than at the end, so it heats gradually with the yolks.
- YieldCan and jar sizes vary, so the number of peppers, and hence the number of plates, will too; the dressing makes roughly a cup. Covered in the refrigerator it will keep a few days.
This page comes from a Procter & Gamble recipe book issued to teach American cooks what to do with the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening it had launched a few years earlier; the recipes were compiled by Marion Harris Neil, billed as formerly cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and nearly every one contrives a use for the product. The dressing is a cooked or "boiled" dressing, the standard American salad dressing of the period before jarred mayonnaise became common, thickened with flour and egg yolk so that it would keep and would not break. Canned Spanish pimientos were increasingly available in the period, and stuffed pimiento salads on lettuce turn up constantly in club and luncheon menus of the 1910s. The stray lines at the end belong to the book's "Calendar of Dinners," a day-by-day menu scheme, and show the salad sitting in a January meal alongside lettuce soup and roast mutton with caper sauce.