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February 20
Menu: Onion Cocktail; Halibut, a la Martin; Roast Mutton, Currant Mint Sauce; Okra and Tomatoes; Cucumber Jelly Salad; Spanish Cream; Coffee Onion Cocktail-2 cups diced apples, 1 cup diced onions, 1 cup seeded raisins. Fill cocktail glasses with onions, apples, raisins, pour over a sour dressing made as follows: 1/4 cup each of vinegar and water, 1 tablespoon Crisco, salt and red pepper to taste, and 2 teaspoons sugar. Place in small saucepan over fire until Crisco melts, then stir in well beaten yolks of 2 eggs, stirring constantly until thick. Place in ice box to cool before using.
A first-course "cocktail" of the 1910s sort — no alcohol, just cold diced things in a stemmed glass — dressed with a cooked egg-yolk dressing. The dressing is the whole job; the salad is knife work.
- Read the page correctlyThe trailing "February 21 Boiled Halibut, Anchovy Butter, Pigeons a la Chasseur" is the next day's menu from the dinner calendar, not part of this dish. Ignore it.
- CriscoShortening, introduced by Procter & Gamble a couple of years before this book. One tablespoon of any neutral solid or liquid fat does the same work here; butter gives a better flavour in a dressing that is served cold.
- "Over fire" means gentle heatThis is a stirred custard with 2 yolks and only half a cup of liquid, so it thickens fast. Use low heat or a bowl over simmering water and pull it at about 175F, when it coats a spoon. Boil it and you get sweet-sour scrambled egg.
- Temper the yolksStirring beaten yolks straight into the hot vinegar mixture works if the pan is no hotter than it needs to be to melt the Crisco; if it has got properly hot, dribble a little of the liquid into the yolks first, then return everything to the pan.
- Onion choiceA cup of raw diced onion is assertive by modern taste. A sweet onion, or a soak in cold water for ten minutes and a good drain, keeps it from dominating the apples.
- ApplesDice them last and toss with a spoonful of the vinegar, or they will brown before the dressing has chilled. A firm tart variety holds its shape.
- "Ice box" chillingThe dressing must be cold before it goes over the fruit; warm dressing wilts the onion and dulls the apple. An hour in the refrigerator is enough, and it will thicken further as it cools.
- YieldFour cups of solids fills six to eight small cocktail glasses, with a little dressing left over. It is a starter portion, not a salad course.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's book-length argument for a brand-new product: a hydrogenated vegetable shortening sold as a clean, odourless substitute for lard and butter, with several hundred recipes by Marion Harris Neil to prove it could do everything animal fat could. The page appears to come from one of the "Calendar of Dinners" sequences associated with the Crisco cookbooks, which supplied a full menu for every day of the year — though which volume it belongs to is not settled by the page itself — and that is presumably why a dish is followed by a fragment of the next day's bill of fare. The cocktail course itself was a fixture of American formal dining in this period — oyster cocktails, clam cocktails, grapefruit and fruit cocktails served in stemmed glasses on ice before the soup — and the name referred to the glass and the position in the meal, not to any spirit. An onion version is unusual even for the era, and reads as an attempt to show a cooked Crisco dressing doing the work that oil would ordinarily do in a mayonnaise or French dressing.