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April 24
Menu: Vegetarian; Cream of Pea Soup; Ladies' Cabbage in Ramekins; Chestnut Puree; Mock New Potatoes *Creamed Beets; Banana Salad; Marshmallow Pudding; Coffee Creamed Beets-Boil 8 medium-sized beets until tender, then remove from saucepan and place them in cold water, rub skins off carefully with hands, cut in 1/2 inch cubes. Make a sauce of 2 tablespoons Crisco creamed with 2 tablespoons flour and 1/2 cup water in which beets were boiled 2 tablespoons cream, 2 tablespoons vinegar, 2 teaspoons sugar, salt and pepper to taste. Pour sauce over hot beets and serve in hot dish.
A plain buttered-beet dish with a vinegar-sharpened white sauce, given here as one dish in a dated dinner menu. The method is sound; only the fat and a few vague quantities need translating.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and still usable here. Butter works well in this sauce and many will prefer the flavour; a neutral oil will make the roux, though it cannot be "creamed" to a paste in the same way. The book names Crisco because it was issued to promote it.
- Boiling the beetsMedium beets take 30 to 45 minutes at a simmer, longer if old. Leave an inch of stem and the root tail attached and do not peel first, or the colour bleeds into the water — water you are told to keep for the sauce.
- Reserve the cooking liquidHalf a cup of beet water is the main liquid, alongside the cream and the vinegar, so measure it out before draining. It carries both colour and earthy sweetness into the sauce.
- Order of operations for the sauce"Creamed with flour" means rub the fat and flour to a paste, then whisk in the beet water and cook it out for a minute or two before the cream goes in. Add the vinegar last, off the heat, so the cream is less likely to break.
- Seasoning balanceTwo tablespoons vinegar to two teaspoons sugar is quite sharp — sweet-sour in the manner of Harvard beets, though much less sweet, and thickened with roux rather than starch. Taste and adjust; cider vinegar suits it better than distilled white.
- CreamRead this as heavy or light cream, not half-and-half or milk. Two tablespoons is a small amount, so richness matters more than volume.
- YieldEight medium beets serve four to six as a side. The sauce is a scant cup, enough to coat rather than pool.
Creamed vegetables of this kind — a fat-and-flour roux slackened with cooking water and finished with cream — were a common American treatment for garden produce in the early twentieth century, and beets got a splash of vinegar and sugar on top, a sweet-sour pairing often associated with Northern and Eastern European kitchens. The dish appears here inside a "Calendar of Dinners," a year of dated menus associated with the Crisco cookbooks, of which The Story of Crisco (1913) was issued by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a brand-new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shelf-stable stand-in for both butter and lard. Recipes like this one were the argument — a sauce customarily made with butter, shown working just as well with the new fat, and printed under a date so a housekeeper could simply cook the book.</paragraph>