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February 2
Menu: Artichoke Soup; Fried Fillets of Fish, Sauce Tartare; Riced Potatoes; Onions Stuffed with Nuts; Egg Salad Toasted Cheese; Russian Charlotte; Coffee Artichoke Soup-2 pints white stock or water, 1 pint milk, 2 pounds Jerusalem artichokes, 2 onions, 1 bay leaf, 1 strip celery, 2 tablespoons Crisco, pepper and salt to taste. Wash artichokes, put 1 tablespoon vinegar into basin of water and keep artichokes in it as much as possible while paring them, to preserve their whiteness. Cut onions, bay leaf, celery, and artichokes into slices, melt Crisco in stewpan, fry vegetables 10 or 15 minutes without browning; then pour in stock and boil until tender. Rub through fine sieve, return to saucepan, add milk and seasoning, bring to boil and serve. When a thicker soup is desired 1 dessertspoon of cornstarch, flour, or a mashed potato should be blended with little milk or stock, and added to soup a few minutes before serving.
A straightforward sweated-vegetable purée soup, printed as part of Crisco's day-by-day dinner calendar. Two things carry it: the acidulated water that keeps the tubers pale, and a slow fry that never colours.
- Jerusalem artichokesThese are sunchokes, the knobbly tubers of Helianthus tuberosus — no relation to globe artichokes. Two pounds is roughly what you need for six servings; scrub well, since the skins hold grit in every crease.
- Acidulated waterThe cut flesh browns within a minute or two of exposure. The vinegar bath is not decorative — skip it and the finished soup is beige rather than ivory.
- Do not brown the vegetablesThe 10 to 15 minutes of frying is a sweat, not a sauté: low heat, lid ajar, no colour at all. Any browning on the onion or the tuber shows up as a grey cast in the purée.
- White stockA pale, unroasted veal or chicken stock. Any light chicken stock works; avoid dark or heavily reduced stocks, which will overwhelm the delicate, faintly sweet tuber flavour. Water genuinely does work here, as the recipe allows.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups, so this is 4 cups stock and 2 cups milk. A dessertspoon is about 2 teaspoons — modest thickening, and generally unnecessary if you purée thoroughly.
- CriscoTwo tablespoons of any neutral solid or liquid fat; butter is better here for flavour, since nothing in the soup needs the flat neutrality Crisco was sold on.
- Sieving"Rub through fine sieve" is a chinois and a ladle. A blender or stick blender does the work in seconds, though a pass through a sieve afterwards still catches the fibrous bits sunchokes leave behind.
- DigestibilitySunchokes are high in inulin, which many people do not digest comfortably in quantity. Serve as a first course in modest cups rather than as a bowl-sized main.
Procter & Gamble's book-length advertisement for hydrogenated cottonseed oil appeared in 1913 as The Story of Crisco, and its day-by-day dinner calendar existed to place the new fat inside a full year of respectable menus — here, two tablespoons of it in a soup where an English cookbook would likely have specified butter. (The same recipe collection circulated in later printings retitled around the calendar of dinners.) The soup itself is thoroughly Victorian-British in form: sweated aromatics, white stock, a sieve, milk at the end, with the optional cornstarch or mashed potato offered as a thickener. Jerusalem artichokes had been grown in Europe since the early seventeenth century, brought back from North America, and the name is usually traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower — traditional etymology rather than settled fact. Cheap, prolific and indifferent to poor soil, the tubers were kitchen-garden staples of exactly the sort a household cook would have on hand in early February, which is where this entry falls in the calendar.