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February 9
Menu: Petite Marmite; Goulash of Veal; Cauliflower, Cream Sauce; Braised Endive Orange Salad; Mousseline Pudding; Coffee; new Goulash of Veal-12 pounds lean veal, 1 pound partly cooked potatoes, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 small onion, 1/2 pint cream, paprika, pepper, and salt. Free meat from skin and sinews and cut it into dice. Cut potatoes into cubes. Melt Crisco in saucepan, add meat and fry lightly for several minutes, add onion, finely chopped, stir over fire for about 5 minutes, season with salt and pepper to taste and add potatoes. Pour off superfluous fat, mix carefully and moisten with cream and 1 tablespoon rich white stock, season with a sufficiency of paprika pepper to give sauce a pink tint, and cook gently for 20 minutes. It is best to cook the Goulash at latter stage in a fireproof earthenware stewpan, in which it should be sent to table. Great care must be taken so as not to break potatoes while cooking. Serve very hot.
A quick veal stew from the Crisco company's dinner calendar, thickened with nothing but cream and reduced pan juices. It reads as a small family dish, and the meat quantity as printed does not match the rest of the proportions.
- The meat quantityHalf a pint of cream, four tablespoons of fat and one pound of potatoes will not stretch over twelve pounds of veal. The figure has lost a fraction; the balance of the other ingredients points to somewhere between one and one and a half pounds of lean veal, which is what this should be built around.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold. Four tablespoons is a generous amount for browning; butter or a neutral oil behaves the same way here, though the book naturally will not say so.
- Veal to buyShoulder or leg cut into half-inch dice. Twenty minutes of gentle simmering only suits tender cuts -- a collagen-heavy cut such as shank needs hours, and will be tough on this timetable.
- Paprika as seasoning, not colour aloneThe instruction to add enough "to give sauce a pink tint" is a measure of quantity, not a garnish: expect a rounded teaspoon or more of sweet Hungarian paprika. Stir it in off the direct heat, since paprika scorches quickly and turns bitter.
- "One tablespoon rich white stock"A single tablespoon is almost certainly less liquid than the dish wants; a light veal or chicken stock, several tablespoons of it, gives the cream something to loosen into. Add it gradually and keep the pan at a bare simmer so the cream does not break.
- Partly cooked potatoesBoil waxy potatoes until just yielding at the edges but still firm at the centre, then cube. Fully cooked cubes will collapse during the final twenty minutes, which is the breakage the recipe warns about.
- The earthenware panFinishing in a flameproof earthenware or enamelled cast-iron pot lets you carry the dish to the table and holds the heat, which matters for a cream sauce. If yours is not rated for direct flame, use a diffuser or finish in a 325F oven.
- YieldWith the meat quantity read as roughly a pound and a half, this serves four with bread or buttered noodles.
Crisco appeared in 1911, and the company promoted it hard through cookbooks like this one, which pairs a dated menu calendar with recipes recasting familiar European dishes in vegetable shortening rather than butter or lard. This "goulash" is a long way from a Hungarian gulyas: no long braise, no great weight of onion, and cream instead of a paprika-heavy broth. It sits closer to the softened continental style that some American and English cookery writers of the period labelled goulash largely on the strength of the paprika -- not far from a Viennese Rahmgulasch, where sour cream or sweet cream finishes the pan. The placement on February 10 reflects the book's calendar format, a dinner assigned to each day.