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November 16
Menu: Cream of Corn Soup; Roast Turkey, Giblet Sauce; Mashed Potatoes; Melon Mangoes; Creamed Onions; Cheese Fingers; Coffee; Apple Strudel Apple Strudel-Sift 2 cups flour with 1/2 teaspoonful salt and 1 teaspoon sugar. Add gradually 1 cup lukewarm water, and knead until dough does not stick to hands. Roll dough as thin as possible on floured board. Place clean tablecloth on table, put rolled out dough on it and pull carefully with fingers to get thin as possible. Mix 4 cups chopped apples with 1 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon cinnamon, 1 cup seeded raisins, and 1 cup currants. Spread over dough, and spread little Crisco over apples. Take cloth in both hands, and roll strudel over and over like roly poly. Roll strudel into Criscoed baking pan and bake in hot oven until brown.
A workable strudel, though the original leaves out two things every modern strudel recipe insists on: a rest for the dough and any fat in it. Both are worth restoring.
- Rest the dough — the hingeThe recipe sends you straight from kneading to rolling. Gluten that tight will spring back and tear the moment you stretch it. Knead until smooth and elastic, then cover and leave it 30 to 60 minutes at room temperature; after that it will pull to translucency without fighting.
- A little fat in the doughSome strudel doughs of the period included a spoonful or two of oil or melted shortening, which makes the sheet more extensible and less prone to holes. Adding 2 tablespoons of neutral oil or melted shortening to the water is consistent with that practice even if this particular text omits it.
- "Hot oven"Read this as 400-425F. At that heat a full-size strudel will brown in roughly 30 to 45 minutes depending on thickness; brush the roll with melted shortening or butter partway through so the top colors evenly.
- Crisco, then and nowCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, firmer and more waxy than today's reformulated, low-trans-fat version. Any solid vegetable shortening substitutes directly, and melted butter will taste better on the pastry surface.
- Currants and raisins"Currants" here means dried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. A cup each of currants and raisins alongside a cup of sugar makes a very sweet filling by current taste; half those amounts is defensible.
- That tablespoon of cinnamonThree teaspoons of cinnamon to four cups of apple is assertive even for the period. Start with one teaspoon and adjust, particularly if your cinnamon is cassia.
- Keep the apples dryChopped apple tossed with sugar will weep and soften the sheet. Fill and roll immediately, or scatter a handful of dry breadcrumbs or ground nuts over the dough first, which is the usual Central European fix for a soggy bottom.
- The tableclothUse an old, smooth cotton or linen cloth, floured lightly, spread over a table you can walk around. Stretch from underneath with the backs of your hands, working outward from the center, until you can read print through the sheet. Lifting the cloth to roll is the whole point of the method — the dough is too thin to handle directly.
- YieldOne roll, roughly 12 to 14 inches, serving eight to ten. Serve warm, dusted with confectioners' sugar.
The Story of Crisco was published in 1913, two years after Procter & Gamble introduced the shortening, and it is a cookbook written to answer the question of what a household would do with a can of it. The "Calendar of Dinners" section assigns a menu to every day of the year, which is how an apple strudel comes to be filed under November 17 next to stewed rabbit. Strudel itself is Austrian and Hungarian, its name simply the German word for whirlpool or eddy, describing the spiral of the rolled sheet; the paper-thin stretched dough is generally traced back through the Habsburg lands to Ottoman layered pastry. Its appearance in an American promotional cookbook reflects the millions of Central European immigrants then cooking in the United States — and Crisco was marketed hard to that population, including to Jewish households, for whom a vegetable shortening was neither meat nor dairy and so could be used freely at either kind of meal.