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February 13
Menu: Bombay Toast; Boiled Halibut, Lobster Sauce; Roast Capon Beet and Potato Salad; Cheese Ramekins; Peach Border; Coffee Bombay Toast-Fry the required number of croutes in Crisco. When cold spread with paste of pounded chicken and cream. Chop some capers, and lay in a thick line across the chicken paste. On one-half put grated yolk of hard-cooked egg, on the other half put grated white of hard-cooked egg, and serve. Saint Valentine's Day.
A savoury canapé rather than a cooked dish: fried bread rounds, potted chicken, capers and sieved egg. The whole thing is assembled cold, so the only cooking is the croûtes and the eggs.
- CroûtesSmall rounds or fingers of crustless bread, about 1/4 inch thick and 1 1/2 to 2 inches across, fried until crisp all the way through rather than merely browned. Soft centres will go soggy the moment the chicken paste touches them.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco in 1913 was newly hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a cleaner-tasting rival to lard. Today's Crisco has been reformulated to cut trans fats to negligible levels; clarified butter or any neutral oil fries these croûtes just as well and tastes better cold.
- "When cold"This matters more than it looks. Warm fried bread will weep fat into the chicken paste and the assembly turns greasy. Drain the croûtes on paper and let them come fully to room temperature.
- Chicken pastePoached or roast breast meat, pounded to a smooth paste in a mortar with enough cream to make it spreadable — roughly 2 tablespoons cream to a cupful of meat. A food processor does it in seconds. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of mace; the original assumes you know to season.
- Grated eggPush hard-cooked yolk and white separately through a fine sieve rather than grating; you get a lighter, more even mimosa effect. The capers down the centre are meant to divide the two colours cleanly.
- CapersChop them fine and blot them dry. Wet brine bleeds into pale chicken paste and greys the yolk line.
- Timing and yieldNo quantity is given because this was made to fit the table; the recipe says only 'the required number of croutes'. Assemble close to serving; they do not hold.
- Where it belongs in the mealThis is a savoury, served after the sweet course or handed round with drinks — one or two per person, not a plateful.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a cookbook written to sell a product: Procter & Gamble's hydrogenated shortening, launched in 1911, needed housewives to believe it could replace both butter and lard. Dated dinner entries were a way of showing the fat turning up everywhere, including in a Valentine's Day savoury like this one. "Bombay toast" belongs to the British colonial repertoire of highly seasoned little toasts served at the close of a dinner — the anchovy toasts, devilled biscuits and curried croûtes that appear all through late-Victorian and Edwardian cookery, generally given exotic place-names whether or not they had any connection to the place. The sieved yolk-and-white finish, sometimes called mimosa, was a standard garnish of the period and here does double duty as decoration for the fourteenth of February.