Home › A Calendar of Dinners › August 17
August 17
Menu: Peas; Lamb Chops; Chantilly Potatoes; Turkish Salad; Fruit Ice Cream; Coffee Chantilly Potatoes-Prepare nicely seasoned, lightly mashed potatoes and mound on a hot platter. Beat 1/2 cup cream until stiff, add 1 teaspoon melted Crisco, 1½ cup grated cheese, season to taste with salt, pepper and red pepper. Pile lightly on to the potato and put in oven to brown. Be sure that the oven is very hot. Watermelon Cocktail Cannelon of Beef Potatoes *Creamed Kohl Rabi Stuffed Celery Meringues Filled with Ice Cream Coffee sauce: Creamed Kohl Rabi-Slice kohl rabi, boil 20 minutes or until nearly tender, and arrange in a baking dish in layers with the following 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 tablespoons flour, 1/2 pint milk, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1 saltspoon pepper. Rub Crisco and flour together; add milk, cold. Stand saucepan over fire and stir continually until it reaches the boiling point; take from fire, and add salt and pepper. Then strain. Season each layer with pepper and salt, sprinkle the top with breadcrumbs and bake 20 minutes.
A cheese-and-whipped-cream gratin topping over mashed potato, from the era when Crisco was being promoted as a substitute for butter in everything. It comes together quickly, and the only real risk is a topping that slumps instead of browning.
- Get the oven hot firstThe instruction to be sure the oven is very hot is the hinge of the dish. Whipped cream slumps rather than browns in moderate heat; a "very hot" oven in period usage means roughly 450-500F, or run the platter under the broiler for two to three minutes, watching it the whole time.
- The cheese quantityThe printed page was checked and the topping calls for 1/2 cup grated cheese folded into 1/2 cup stiffly whipped cream. Use a dry grating cheese and fold lightly so the mixture keeps enough body to pile on the potato.
- Red pepperThis means ground cayenne, not paprika and not a fresh pepper. A pinch is enough for the whole topping.
- The teaspoon of CriscoOne teaspoon of melted shortening in half a cup of cream does nothing that the cream is not already doing. It is here because the book exists to sell Crisco. Butter, or nothing at all, works as well.
- Fold, do not stirWhip the cream to stiff peaks, then fold in the cheese and seasoning with a spatula. Beating the cheese in will knock out the air that makes the topping puff and brown in streaks.
- Use an ovenproof platterThe recipe assumes a platter that can go into a very hot oven. Modern serving platters often crack under broiler heat; build the dish in a shallow gratin dish or on a metal sheet.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of potato and no serving count; scale the topping to the mound of potato you have. Serve it straight from the oven.
The name points to Chantilly, the French château whose kitchens are traditionally credited with giving their name to sweetened whipped cream, crème Chantilly; in savoury cookery "à la Chantilly" came to mean any dish finished with whipped cream. The dish belongs to the moment when French service vocabulary was filtering into ordinary American home cooking through hotel menus and the women's magazines. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco is a marketing exercise as much as a culinary one: the book was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to introduce hydrogenated cottonseed shortening to cooks who had always used butter or lard, and a single teaspoon of Crisco has been worked into a recipe that has no structural need of it, so that the brand name appears on the page.
The text is garbled where the ingredient list collides with the sauce method, but the dish is straightforward: parboiled kohlrabi layered with a plain white sauce, crumbed and baked. Read the two tablespoons Crisco, two tablespoons flour, half pint milk and seasonings as the sauce, not as part of the vegetable layers.
- The hinge: cold milk, constant stirringThe fat and flour are rubbed together raw and the milk added cold, then brought to a boil with continuous stirring. This is a blended roux rather than a cooked one; if the milk goes in warm or the stirring stops it will lump, and straining will only partly rescue the texture.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon. Half a pint is one cup of milk, which gives a thin-to-medium sauce; the recipe does not state how much kohl rabi to use.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal in 1913. A moderate oven, 350-375F, will heat the dish through and brown the crumbs in the stated 20 minutes, since everything going in is already cooked.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated; the 1913 product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Butter gives a better white sauce here and nothing in the method depends on the shortening.
- Choosing kohlrabiUse bulbs no larger than a tennis ball and peel them thickly; the outer layer is woody and stays so however long it boils. Large late-season bulbs will not come tender in 20 minutes.
- StrainingThe instruction to strain the sauce is worth keeping only if it has gone lumpy. A well-stirred sauce loses nothing but time going through a sieve.
- YieldTwo medium bulbs and a cup of sauce will roughly fill a small baking dish and serve about four as a side; the recipe itself states no yield. Season the layers lightly, since the sauce is already salted.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook for the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening it had introduced two years earlier, and its "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a full menu to every day of the year, each one leaning on the new fat. That is why this modest vegetable gratin is dated August 19: kohlrabi is a late-summer crop, and the book's job was to show the product turning up in every part of the meal, sauces included, rather than only in pastry. Kohlrabi is often said to have reached American gardens largely through German-speaking immigrants, and its name is simply German for cabbage-turnip; it appears in period American cookbooks far more often than in modern ones.