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December 9
Menu: Oysters; Chicken Hot Pot; Celery Salad Dried Apricot Shortcake; Coffee Chicken Hot Pot-Prepare large chicken. Cut into as small pieces as joints allow. Do not remove meats from bones. Boil chicken until nearly tender and keep broth left in kettle when you remove chicken from it. Cut 1 pound of lean, raw ham into small squares. Wash and peel and parboil 8 large potatoes and slice them. Slice 3 medium-sized onions. Put into deep baking dish layer of chicken, layer of ham, layer of potatoes, and layer of onions. Repeat until all are used up; when arranging these layers strew tiny bits of Crisco over them. Pour
A layered chicken-and-ham casserole built on the English hot pot pattern, written to sell shortening. The text breaks off mid-sentence at the page turn, so the final step has to be reconstructed.
- The missing lineThe recipe ends at "Pour"; the reserved broth is almost certainly what is poured over the assembled layers. The rest of the step is lost, but comparable hot pots are baked covered and finished uncovered so the top potatoes brown.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal in 1913. A moderate oven, 350F, covered, for about an hour finishes the chicken and potatoes; ten to fifteen minutes uncovered browns the surface.
- "Large chicken"A period large fowl was often an older bird of 5 lb or more, hence the preliminary boiling. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken works; simmer 35-45 minutes only, to just short of tender, since it finishes in the oven.
- Cutting on the bone"As small pieces as joints allow" means jointing plus splitting the breast and back — a heavy knife or cleaver, not a boning knife. Leaving the bones in is what gives the broth and the finished dish body.
- Lean raw hamThis is uncooked cured ham, not deli ham. A piece of raw gammon or a thick slice of country ham diced small is the equivalent; if it is heavily salted, soak or parboil it and salt the dish only at the end.
- Parboiling the potatoesFive minutes in boiling water is enough — they should still be firm to slice, since a full hour in the oven finishes them. Sliced about a quarter inch thick holds its shape between layers.
- The Crisco"Tiny bits" strewn between the layers means no more than a light dotting; the original gives no quantity. Butter or the fat skimmed from the chicken broth does the same work.
- YieldA pound of ham, eight potatoes and a whole chicken feeds eight to ten. Use the largest deep dish you own; a standard 9x13 will be brimming.
The Story of Crisco (1913) paired promotional matter with menus and recipes written by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal — the December 10 dinner is one of those daily entries, which is why the recipe runs on without a break and gets guillotined by the page number. The dish itself is an American adaptation of the British hot pot, a layered meat-and-potato bake generally traced to Lancashire, where the point was a dish that could sit in a slow oven unattended. Its presence here is commercial as much as culinary: Procter & Gamble had launched Crisco, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, in 1911, and needed to show a wholly new product doing the everyday jobs of butter and lard, right down to being dotted between layers of potato.