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February 11
Menu: Cream Soup; Flounder au Gratin; Veal Cutlets, Brown Gravy; Creamed Potatoes; Cauliflower Polonaise; Radish Salad; Friar's Omelet; Coffee Friar's Omelet-Peel and core 1 pound cooking apples, and boil to pulp with little water and sugar. When nearly cold add 1 tablespoon Crisco and 1 or 2 well beaten eggs. Crisco a pudding dish and coat Pour thickly with breadcrumbs. in mixture and cover thickly with more breadcrumbs. Cook in oven for 3/4 of an hour. A little lemon peel can be added if liked.
The text breaks off mid-instruction, so what survives is the apple base and the direction to grease and coat a pudding dish. In the standard Victorian form the coating is fine breadcrumbs, the apple goes in atop them, more crumbs go over, and the whole is baked until set.
- The recipe is incompleteThe verbatim passage ends at "coat," leaving the assembly and baking unstated. Treat it as a fragment and fill in the finish from a full version rather than assuming the dish is done once the apple is mixed.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 as an all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, sold as a substitute for both butter and lard. A tablespoon of butter behaves the same here; modern Crisco has been reformulated to remove trans fats, so it is not identical to the original product.
- Cooking applesOne pound is about three medium apples. Use a variety that collapses — Bramley or McIntosh — since the point is a pulp, not slices holding their shape.
- Sugar is unmeasured"Little water and sugar" is left to the cook. Start with two tablespoons of sugar per pound of apples and taste the hot pulp; sharp cooking apples of the period took considerably more than a dessert apple would.
- Why nearly coldThe eggs are the setting agent. Beating them into hot apple pulp scrambles them and the pudding turns grainy instead of custardy.
- Egg sizePeriod eggs ran somewhat smaller on average than today's large. "1 or 2" with modern eggs means one for a soft, apple-forward pudding, two for something closer to a baked custard.
- OvenThe fragment gives no oven direction at all; full versions of the dish bake it in a moderate oven, so around 350F for 30 to 40 minutes in a small dish, until the centre is set and any crumb topping has browned.
- YieldA pound of apples with one or two eggs fills a pint-and-a-half pudding dish and serves four modestly, with cream or a thin custard.
Friar's Omelet is not an omelet in any French sense: it is an English baked apple pudding, layered or bound with breadcrumbs and eggs, that appears under that name in nineteenth-century household cookery books and is often said to take its name from the plain monastic fare it resembles — apples, bread, a little fat. Its presence in The Story of Crisco is the whole point of that book, which surrounded well over six hundred conventional recipes with the argument that a new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could stand in for butter and lard anywhere they appeared. Greasing the pudding dish with Crisco and stirring a spoonful into the apple is a demonstration as much as a method, and the appearance of this thoroughly old-fashioned nursery pudding in a 1910s promotional cookbook shows how the manufacturer worked: take dishes cooks already made without thinking, and put the new tin in the middle of them.