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May 30
Menu: Decoration Day.; Fruit Soup; Breaded Mutton Chops; Potatoes; Peas; Tomato Mayonnaise; Banana Charlotte Russe; Assorted Cakes; Coffee Peas-1 quart cooked green peas, 2 ounces of lean cooked ham cut into dice, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 tablespoons good stock, 1 teaspoon flour, 1½ small onion finely chopped, a pinch of sugar, grated nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste. Fry onion until lightly browned in Crisco, add flour and ham, stir over fire for a minute or two, then put in peas, stock, sugar, and nutmeg. Season to taste, simmer for ten minutes, stirring occasionally, then serve. Milk Soup Beef Loaf, Brown Sauce Carrot Salad-Scrape, cut into slices and then into fancy shapes, 4 large carrots. Soak in cold water for 1/2 an hour, and then cook in boiling unsalted water until tender. Drain and dry. Line salad bowl with crisp May 31 lettuce leaves, and arrange on top the carrots. Serve with following dressing: Rub sides and bottom of bowl with clove garlic, add salt and pepper to taste and 6 tablespoons melted Crisco; add piece of ice, if possible; stir until salt is dissolved, then add 1 tablespoon vinegar lemon juice. Beat until thick; use at once.
The page is a scrap of a dinner calendar, mistitled here, and the only workable recipe on it is the carrot salad and its dressing. Everything else is a menu line.
- The melted shortening is the problemCrisco is solid at room temperature, so a dressing of six tablespoons of melted shortening poured over cold carrots sets into a waxy coating within a minute or two. Use a neutral liquid oil — grapeseed, sunflower or a mild olive oil — in the same quantity if you want the dish to eat well.
- "Use at once"That instruction is the hinge and it is there for the reason above. Even with liquid oil, this emulsion is beaten by hand and will separate; dress the carrots at the table.
- The piece of iceA standard period trick for hand-beaten dressings: the cold helps the oil and acid hold together briefly and chills the mixture. A small ice cube, fished out before serving, does the job.
- "1 tablespoon vinegar lemon juice"A typesetting casualty. The original almost certainly read "vinegar or lemon juice" — one tablespoon of either. Note that a single tablespoon of acid to six of fat is very rich by current taste; two to three tablespoons gives a dressing most people would recognise.
- Unsalted cooking waterThe instruction is explicit rather than a slip, though the recipe gives no reason for it. It makes little practical difference; salt the water if you prefer, and shorten the boil to 5–8 minutes for sliced carrots so the fancy shapes keep their edges.
- The garlic rubRubbing a cut clove around the bowl, as here, keeps the garlic very faint, which was a common approach in Anglo-American cooking of this period. A crushed clove left in the dressing is closer to how the salad would be made now.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; four large carrots and this quantity of dressing would serve about four as a side salad.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale, and the book's job was to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter, lard and suet across an entire day's cooking. The "Calendar of Dinners" section is the hardest-working part of that argument: a menu for every date of the year, with Crisco quietly threaded through the pastry, the frying, the sauces — and, as here, the salad dressing, where a solid fat would have been an unusual choice. Cottonseed oil, Crisco's raw material, had long been used in soap and lamp oil as well as in food, and the hydrogenation that turned it into a shortening was new enough that the company felt obliged to explain the product in print. Carrots cut "into fancy shapes" and laid on lettuce may belong to the same moment: a middle-class table learning to serve vegetables as a separate salad course.
The page is a scrap of a dinner calendar, mistitled here, and the only workable recipe on it is the carrot salad and its dressing. Everything else is a menu line.
- The melted shortening is the problemCrisco is solid at room temperature, so a dressing of six tablespoons of melted shortening poured over cold carrots sets into a waxy coating within a minute or two. Use a neutral liquid oil — grapeseed, sunflower or a mild olive oil — in the same quantity if you want the dish to eat well.
- "Use at once"That instruction is the hinge and it is there for the reason above. Even with liquid oil, this emulsion is beaten by hand and will separate; dress the carrots at the table.
- The piece of iceA standard period trick for hand-beaten dressings: the cold helps the oil and acid hold together briefly and chills the mixture. A small ice cube, fished out before serving, does the job.
- "1 tablespoon vinegar lemon juice"A typesetting casualty. The original almost certainly read "vinegar or lemon juice" — one tablespoon of either. Note that a single tablespoon of acid to six of fat is very rich by current taste; two to three tablespoons gives a dressing most people would recognise.
- Unsalted cooking waterThe instruction is explicit rather than a slip, though the recipe gives no reason for it. It makes little practical difference; salt the water if you prefer, and shorten the boil to 5–8 minutes for sliced carrots so the fancy shapes keep their edges.
- The garlic rubRubbing a cut clove around the bowl, as here, keeps the garlic very faint, which was a common approach in Anglo-American cooking of this period. A crushed clove left in the dressing is closer to how the salad would be made now.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; four large carrots and this quantity of dressing would serve about four as a side salad.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale, and the book's job was to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter, lard and suet across an entire day's cooking. The "Calendar of Dinners" section is the hardest-working part of that argument: a menu for every date of the year, with Crisco quietly threaded through the pastry, the frying, the sauces — and, as here, the salad dressing, where a solid fat would have been an unusual choice. Cottonseed oil, Crisco's raw material, had long been used in soap and lamp oil as well as in food, and the hydrogenation that turned it into a shortening was new enough that the company felt obliged to explain the product in print. Carrots cut "into fancy shapes" and laid on lettuce may belong to the same moment: a middle-class table learning to serve vegetables as a separate salad course.