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June 25
Menu: Soup with Bread Balls; Fried Spring Chicken, Milk Gravy; New Potatoes Asparagus; Tomato Mayonnaise; Rhubarb Fanchonettes; Coffee Rhubarb Fanchonettes - 2 pounds rhubarb, 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup strained orange juice, 1 tablespoon powdered gelatine, 1 piece orange peel, 1 cup cream, whipped, flavored and sweetened, number of individual pastry shells. Cut rhubarb into inch pieces. Hot house variety needs no peeling. Place in baking dish in layers, sprinkling sugar between layers. Add 2 tablespoons water, 1 tablespoon Crisco, and a few thin strips orange peel, place in moderate oven, cover and bake 1 hour. Dissolve gelatine in orange juice and when rhubarb is cooked remove it from oven and add this mixture to it. Let it get cold. When ready to serve fill shells with rhubarb mixture, heap with whipped cream and decorate with crystallized orange peel. Curried Chicken New Green Peas Young Carrots Macedoine Salad Boiled Custard with Snow Eggs Coffee Curried Chicken-Clean and dress a for serving. Put 1/3 cup Crisco in a 3-pound chicken and cut in pieces hot frying pan, add chicken, and cook 10 minutes, tightly covered. Then add liver and gizzard, and continue cooking for 10 minutes longer. Cut 2 medium-sized onions in thin slices, and add to chicken with 2 teaspoons salt and 1 tablespoon curry powder. Add sufficient boiling water to cover, and simmer until chicken is tender. Remove chicken, strain liquor, and thicken it with a roux of flour and water. Make border of boiled rice around platter or serving dish, chicken in center, and pour curry sauce over it.
The text as printed is scrambled — two columns of the original page have been interleaved, so the sentences read out of order. Untangled, it says: clean and dress a 3-pound chicken and cut in pieces for serving; put 1/3 cup Crisco in a hot frying pan, add chicken, and cook 10 minutes, tightly covered. What follows the fragment — the curry itself — is missing.
- The recipe is incompleteNothing here tells you what makes it curried: no curry powder, no onion, no stock or liquid, no simmering time. Treat this as the browning stage of a longer method and take the sauce from a full recipe.
- "Clean and dress"In 1913 this meant plucking, drawing and singeing a bird bought whole. A supermarket chicken cut into eight serving pieces needs no preparation beyond patting dry.
- 1/3 cup CriscoAbout 65 g of hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and a very generous amount of fat for one chicken. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat behaves the same way; two to three tablespoons is enough to brown the pieces.
- Ten minutes, tightly coveredA covered pan steams as much as it fries, so the skin will pale rather than brown. For colour, brown uncovered in batches, skin side down, before adding any liquid.
- DonenessTen minutes will not cook a 3-pound chicken through. Bone-in pieces need roughly 25 to 35 minutes of simmering in sauce; the thigh should read 165F/74C at the thickest point, close to but not touching the bone.
- YieldA 3-pound bird cut up serves four, or three if the sauce is the only accompaniment.
Crisco went on sale in 1911, and the book this page comes from was the company's own promotional cookbook — a "calendar of dinners" designed to show that a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could stand in for butter, lard and suet in every course of the day. Curried chicken earns its place because curry powder had been a fixture of American and British household cookery since the nineteenth century, sold ready-blended and treated as a single seasoning rather than a spice mixture to be ground at home. The pitch behind the recipe is the frying: Crisco was marketed heavily on the claim that it did not smoke or carry flavour between dishes, so the same fat could fry fish, then chicken, then doughnuts. The scrambled state of the text here is a hazard of the original two-column page rather than anything the cook of 1913 would have faced.
The text as printed is scrambled — two columns of the original page have been interleaved, so the sentences read out of order. Untangled, it says: clean and dress a 3-pound chicken and cut in pieces for serving; put 1/3 cup Crisco in a hot frying pan, add chicken, and cook 10 minutes, tightly covered. What follows the fragment — the curry itself — is missing.
- The recipe is incompleteNothing here tells you what makes it curried: no curry powder, no onion, no stock or liquid, no simmering time. Treat this as the browning stage of a longer method and take the sauce from a full recipe.
- "Clean and dress"In 1913 this meant plucking, drawing and singeing a bird bought whole. A supermarket chicken cut into eight serving pieces needs no preparation beyond patting dry.
- 1/3 cup CriscoAbout 65 g of hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and a very generous amount of fat for one chicken. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat behaves the same way; two to three tablespoons is enough to brown the pieces.
- Ten minutes, tightly coveredA covered pan steams as much as it fries, so the skin will pale rather than brown. For colour, brown uncovered in batches, skin side down, before adding any liquid.
- DonenessTen minutes will not cook a 3-pound chicken through. Bone-in pieces need roughly 25 to 35 minutes of simmering in sauce; the thigh should read 165F/74C at the thickest point, close to but not touching the bone.
- YieldA 3-pound bird cut up serves four, or three if the sauce is the only accompaniment.
Crisco went on sale in 1911, and the book this page comes from was the company's own promotional cookbook — a "calendar of dinners" designed to show that a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could stand in for butter, lard and suet in every course of the day. Curried chicken earns its place because curry powder had been a fixture of American and British household cookery since the nineteenth century, sold ready-blended and treated as a single seasoning rather than a spice mixture to be ground at home. The pitch behind the recipe is the frying: Crisco was marketed heavily on the claim that it did not smoke or carry flavour between dishes, so the same fat could fry fish, then chicken, then doughnuts. The scrambled state of the text here is a hazard of the original two-column page rather than anything the cook of 1913 would have faced.
This page catches a curried chicken mid-sentence — the opening steps, in which the cut-up bird is browned in Crisco, are on the previous page. What survives is enough to work from, with a few things worth knowing before you start.
- The missing beginningThe fragment starts at "add liver and gizzard," so earlier steps, presumably the browning of the jointed chicken in fat, are on the previous page. Work from a 4-5 lb chicken cut into serving pieces, browned in a few tablespoons of shortening or oil, before the giblets go in for their 10 minutes.
- "Strain liquor"Liquor here is simply the cooking liquid, not alcohol. Strain out the onion and any loose bits, then skim the fat before thickening or the sauce will break.
- The roux that is not a rouxA roux is flour cooked in fat; flour stirred into cold water is a slurry. Follow the instruction as written and whisk the paste into simmering liquid gradually, or the sauce will go lumpy. Roughly 2 tablespoons flour to a cup of liquid gives a pourable sauce.
- Curry powder of the periodOne tablespoon for a whole chicken is mild by current standards, and commercial curry powders of the era were generally turmeric-forward, with coriander, cumin and fenugreek among the usual additions. Blooming it in the fat for 30 seconds before the liquid goes in — the book does not say to — takes off the raw, dusty edge.
- Simmering time"Simmer until chicken is tender" is 35-45 minutes for a modern bird, which grows faster and has softer connective tissue than a 1913 fowl. Breast pieces will be done well before thighs; pull them early if you care about texture.
- The gibletsLiver simmered for the full cooking time turns grainy and will muddy the sauce. Cook it separately and add it near the end, or leave it out and use only the gizzard, which wants the long simmer.
- The rice borderAn old service style: rice piped or spooned in a ring around the rim of a hot platter, meat heaped inside. It works if the rice is dry and firm — a long-grain rice, well drained, not a sticky short grain.
- YieldServes four to six as written. The 2 teaspoons salt seasons the whole pot of cooking liquid, so taste and season the finished sauce again.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it. The Calendar of Dinners, of which this entry is a scrap, gave a menu for every day of the year — partly a genuine service to the household planner, partly a demonstration that the new fat could stand in for butter, lard and suet across an entire year of eating. Curried chicken over a rice border was by then thoroughly domesticated in American and British cookbooks, arriving through the Anglo-Indian kitchen and commercial curry powders sold ready-blended in Britain from at least the late eighteenth century; the version here is the mild, thickened, flour-bound sauce that style produced rather than anything closer to its Indian sources. The neighboring line, "June 27 Boiled Salmon, Egg Sauce," marks the start of the next day's menu, so the curry belongs to the day before.