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September 20
Menu: Broiled Striped Bass; Porterhouse Steak with Olives; Baked Creamed Potatoes; Asparagus, Italian Style; String Bean Salad; Pineapple Fluff; Coffee; a Asparagus, Italian Style-Cut tender parts of 2 bunches of asparagus into short lengths and set to boil till quite tender. Take up, drain, and put into saucepan with 3 tablespoons melted Crisco, few drops lemon juice, sprinkling of red pepper and salt. Let get thoroughly hot, take up, and serve on slices of fried bread.
A short vegetable course from the Crisco book's day-by-day dinner calendar. The only thing that really needs rethinking is the boiling time.
- Don't boil it "quite tender"Asparagus cooked to full softness turns olive-drab and limp, and it will be cooked twice here — once in water, once in the fat. Boil or steam the spears 2-4 minutes depending on thickness, until they bend but still snap back, then drain well so the second pan doesn't steam them.
- Two bunches, tender parts onlyA bunch is roughly a pound, so expect about 1 1/2 lb trimmed from 2 lb bought. Snap each spear where it breaks naturally rather than measuring; the woody ends are what the recipe means by discarding all but the tender parts.
- CriscoThree tablespoons of shortening was the point of the book. Butter or olive oil does the same job here and tastes better with asparagus and lemon; the quantity stays the same.
- "Red pepper"In American books of this period red pepper means cayenne, not paprika and not sweet peppers. A sprinkling is about 1/8 teaspoon — enough to warm the dish, not to register as heat.
- Fried breadThe recipe says only "slices of fried bread": bread fried in fat until golden on both sides. Trim the crusts if you like, and allow a slice per serving. Fry them before the asparagus goes into the pan so they are still crisp when the vegetable is spooned over; they soften quickly under the butter and lemon.
- Lemon at the endA few drops only, and add them off the heat if you can. Acid held over heat with green vegetables dulls the colour.
- YieldServes four as a side or first course, or two as a light supper dish on the fried bread.
The heading appears to be an artifact of the book's layout rather than the dish: this page falls in A Calendar of Dinners, the year of suggested menus in The Story of Crisco (1913), where the running head belongs to the surrounding material and the September 21 entry is the asparagus. Crisco had gone on sale only a year or two before — it was introduced in 1911 — and Procter & Gamble published the book to teach cooks what to do with a hydrogenated vegetable shortening that behaved like lard but came from cottonseed — hence recipes like this one, where butter would have been the obvious choice and Crisco is substituted to make the point. Serving vegetables on fried bread or toast was common in period American and English cookery, a way of giving a soft, wet vegetable a base and stretching a small quantity into a course. "Italian style" here seems to signal little more than the lemon and cayenne; the phrase was used loosely in English-language cookbooks of the era for dishes with a Mediterranean gesture in them.