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February 14
Menu: Cupid Canapes; Supreme of Chicken; Clam Bouillon; Fillets of Fish; Spinach; Kumquat and Celery Salad; Martinique Potatoes; Tutti Fruitti Ice Cream; Coffee; Mints Supreme of Chicken-Remove breast meat from 2 young chickens and trim into shape. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in cream, roll in flour and saute in Crisco until delicately browned. Place in small pan, dot over with Crisco, and bake until tender. Remove to cutlet-shaped pieces of hot boiled ham (cut very thin), garnish top of each with 3 short stalks of asparagus, seasoned with Crisco, and pour around following sauce: Melt 31/2 tablespoons Crisco, add 31/2 tablespoons flour, and stir until well blended; then pour on gradually while stirring constantly 1 chicken stock and 1/2 cup cream. Bring to boiling point, season with salt and paprika, and add yolk of 1 egg.
A hotel-style plated dish from Crisco's promotional dinner calendar, dated to February 15. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to hold a velouté without curdling it, so the sauce is where the attention belongs.
- The hinge: the egg yolkAdd the yolk off the heat, after the sauce has come to a boil and been pulled from the burner, and whisk it in fast. Returned to a boil the yolk scrambles and the sauce goes grainy.
- "1 chicken stock"The quantity is missing in the original — almost certainly 1 cup, which with 1/2 cup cream and 3 1/2 tablespoons each of fat and flour gives a properly coating sauce. Treat it as 1 cup and thin with more stock if it sets too stiff.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, and the recipe reads as an advertisement for it. Butter is better in the roux and for dressing the asparagus; use the shortening for the sauté if you want the original's flavor, which is to say almost none.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Moderate, 350F, for 10 to 15 minutes is enough — the breasts are already browned and only need to finish, to 165F internal.
- "Supreme" and trimmingA suprême is the boneless breast fillet, sometimes with the wing bone attached. "Young chickens" of the period were small birds, likely in the 2 to 2 1/2 lb range, so their breasts were small; from modern birds, two whole breasts split into four portions is roughly the equivalent yield.
- The ham baseCut the boiled ham paper-thin and trim each slice to roughly the outline of the chicken, then warm it briefly in a dry pan. Thick ham dominates the dish and makes it hard to cut on the plate.
- AsparagusThree short tips per portion, boiled or steamed until just tender and drained well. Wet asparagus will streak the sauce.
- Yield and serviceFour portions. Sauce the plate around the ham rather than over the chicken, as written — the coating is meant to stay crisp.
The dish belongs to the vocabulary of American hotel and club cookery around 1910, when menus borrowed French terms wholesale: suprême for the trimmed breast fillet, the velouté finished with cream and yolk, the garnish assembled in tidy vertical layers. What makes it worth reading is the frame. The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to introduce a wholly new product — hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a solid cooking fat that was neither lard nor butter — and the book's calendar of dinners exists to show that the fat could do everything both of those did. So Crisco appears here four times in one short recipe: in the sauté, dotted over the chicken, in the roux, and even seasoning the asparagus, a place where a cook of the period might well have reached for butter. The recipe is a demonstration as much as a dinner.