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October 22
Menu: Rice; Okra Soup; Curried Mutton; Stewed Celery with Egg Sauce; Asparagus Salad Pear Fritters; Coffee Okra Soup-Cut into pieces 2½ cups okra, slice 1 onion, slice 1 carrot, slice 1 turnip, three tomatoes skinned and sliced, 1 cup beans, 1 can peas, dice 2 stalks celery and chop 3 tablespoons parsley. a Melt 3 tablespoons Crisco in saucepan, add onion, carrot, turnip, beans, and cook 15 minutes, add okra, celery, and 5 cups water, cook slowly for 12 hours, add seasoning of salt, pepper and red pepper, tomatoes, corn and peas and simmer for 40 minutes. If too thick, thin with stock. Serve hot.
A vegetable soup from the day-by-day dinner calendar at the back of The Story of Crisco (1913), written to show the new hydrogenated shortening doing the work of butter or lard. The text as printed has two problems worth sorting out before you start.
- The twelve hours is almost certainly a misprintThe twelve hours looks like a misprint — a pot of sliced vegetables in five cups of water will not survive twelve hours, and the intended figure was probably something like 1½ hours. Give it 60 to 90 minutes, until the okra has broken down and thickened the liquid.
- The corn appears from nowhereCorn is called for in the seasoning stage but never listed among the prepared vegetables. Add about a cup, cut from two ears or taken from a can, at the same point as the tomatoes and peas.
- Crisco and the substitutionsThree tablespoons of any neutral solid or liquid fat works identically here. Modern Crisco is no longer the partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil of 1913, so there is nothing lost in using butter, oil or bacon fat instead.
- "1 cup beans"Unspecified, but the cooking order — into the fat with the onion, carrot and turnip for fifteen minutes — means fresh green or wax beans cut short, not dried. Dried beans would need soaking and far longer cooking than the recipe allows.
- The canned peasA 1913 can of peas was already fully cooked and soft. If you use frozen peas, add them in the last five minutes rather than for the full forty, or they will collapse.
- Okra and the thickeningOkra is the body of this soup as much as a vegetable in it. Cutting it into rounds and simmering it releases the mucilage that gives the broth its texture; if you want less of that, sear the rounds hard in the fat first before they meet water.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. Start with a pinch — the seasoning goes in with a further forty minutes of simmering to come and will concentrate.
- YieldAround three quarts before reduction, or six to eight servings as a first course. The instruction to thin with stock suggests it was expected to reduce considerably.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after the product launched, with recipes by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The bulk of the book is a straightforward general cookbook — the point was to prove that the new shortening could go anywhere butter or lard went, including into a pot of soup vegetables where its role is little more than a slick of fat. This okra soup sits in the closing "Calendar of Dinners," a menu for every day of the year, on 23 October, alongside a haricot of veal. The dish itself is a Southern one in origin, okra having come to the American South through the Atlantic slave trade, and by the late nineteenth century okra soup was standard in Charleston and Savannah kitchens; what Neil gives here is a plain garden-vegetable soup carrying the okra along with it.