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December 10
Menu: Cream of Celery Soup; Broiled Oysters, a la Francaise; Bean Salad; Cheese Straws; Fig and Apple Cobbler; Coffee Fig and Apple Cobbler-Nearly fill Criscoed baking dish with equal amounts of sliced apples and chopped figs, arranging them in layers; add 1 cup water, strained juice 1 lemon and cover with Crisco biscuit dough about 1 inch thick. Place on range, cover tightly with a pan and simmer 30 minutes. Lift cover carefully, make an opening in middle of crust, and pour in another 1½ cup water, 2 tablespoons Crisco, and 1 cup scraped maple sugar. Sprinkle a little maple sugar over top of pudding before serving it.
A stovetop cobbler rather than a baked one: the crust steams under a tight lid instead of browning. The text is run together with the calendar entry around it, so ignore the stray "Coffee" and "Roast Pork, Apple Sauce" — those belong to the day's menu, not the dish.
- CriscoStill sold, and still the shortening this book was written to promote. Any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way in biscuit dough; butter gives more flavour but a slightly less tender crumb.
- Crisco biscuit doughA plain baking-powder biscuit dough will substitute directly; roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, ¼ cup shortening cut in and about ¾ cup milk gives the right sort of dough, though the recipe as printed gives no proportions. Roll it to about an inch, as the text directs — thicker than you would for oven biscuits, because it has to hold together over liquid.
- The hinge: a genuinely tight lidThere is no oven here. The crust cooks entirely in trapped steam, so the pan inverted over the dish must seal well, and the heat must stay at a bare simmer. A lifted lid or a hard boil gives you a wet, collapsed top.
- Adding liquid mid-cookCutting a vent and pouring in another 1½ cups of water plus shortening and sugar seems odd, but it is how the fruit gets its syrup without the crust going soggy from the start. Pour slowly through the opening, not over the crust.
- Maple sugar"Scraped" most likely means shaved from a hard cake of maple sugar with a knife, one common form in which it was sold. Granulated maple sugar is the direct equivalent, cup for cup. Maple syrup can stand in, but cut back the second addition of water to compensate for the extra liquid.
- FigsDried figs, chopped, are what is meant — fresh figs would dissolve. Stem them first; the stems stay woody through the whole 30 minutes.
- Timing and donenessThirty minutes covered is all the recipe specifies; the second lot of liquid goes in after that and will want a little further time on the heat to warm through. The crust is done when a skewer through the vent comes out clean and the underside is set rather than pasty.
- YieldThe recipe gives no dish size or yield; a 2-quart dish filled with fruit would serve about six. Serve it hot and spooned out; it will not cut into neat squares.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a product nobody had used before: a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening introduced in 1911 as an alternative to lard and butter. Its calendar of dinners gave a menu for every day of the year, which is why this cobbler arrives wedged between coffee and the following day's roast pork. The dish itself is older than the book — a steamed or simmered fruit pudding under a biscuit lid, cooked on top of the range rather than in it, belongs to a long tradition of kitchens where oven heat was expensive or unreliable. The word "nearly" in the title is not part of the dish's name; it is the start of the instruction, "nearly fill," with the line break lost in the original setting.