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December 6
Menu: Caviar Canapes; Roast Duck * Apple Sauce; Canned Beans; Raisins; Mashed Potatoes; Tomato Jelly Salad; Apple Dumplings; Coffee; Nuts Apple Sauce-1 pound apples, 2 tablespoons sugar, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup water, and strained juice of 1/2 lemon. Peel, core, and slice apples, put them into saucepan with sugar, Crisco, water, lemon juice, and cook them until tender. Serve with roast duck.
A plain stewed apple sauce, distinguished only by the two tablespoons of shortening stirred in with the fruit. The rest is straightforward, but a few of the quantities need translating.
- A pound of applesRoughly three medium apples, or about 2 1/2 cups once peeled, cored and sliced. A tart cooking variety holds its flavour against the duck better than a sweet eating apple.
- Why the Crisco is thereFat in apple sauce is a promotional flourish, not a technical necessity — the book exists to find uses for shortening. It gives a slight gloss and softens the acidity. Butter does the same job with more flavour, and the sauce is perfectly good with neither.
- Sugar is minimalTwo tablespoons for a pound of fruit is barely sweetened by modern habit, which suits a sauce meant to cut rich roast duck. Taste at the end and adjust rather than adding more at the start.
- Cook coveredHalf a cup of water will boil away before the apples collapse if the pan is open. Lid on, low heat, 15 to 20 minutes, stirring once or twice; add a spoonful of water only if it threatens to catch.
- Texture is your choiceThe recipe stops at "tender" and says nothing further; period apple sauces were often beaten smooth with a spoon or pressed through a sieve, but leaving it chunky is equally consistent with the instruction.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 cups, enough for four to six as an accompaniment.
- The calendar fragmentThe lines after the recipe belong to the December 7 menu — stewed chicken with cream dressing and baked sweet potatoes — and are not part of the apple sauce.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself was introduced, and was written by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The book's purpose was to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could replace butter and lard in every part of the meal, which is why shortening turns up in places tradition never put it — including a fruit sauce. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a full year of daily menus, a common device in period cookbooks aimed at households where the daily question of what to serve fell to one person. Apple sauce with roast duck or goose is far older than Crisco and is generally traced to the northern European practice of pairing sharp fruit with fatty poultry; here it has simply been enlisted into a advertising campaign.