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February 25
Menu: Clam Broth with Whipped Cream; Boiled Fish; Dressed Cucumbers; Panned Chicken; Riced Potatoes *Stuffed Green Peppers; Celery and Lettuce Salad; Caramel Rice Pudding; Coffee Stuffed Green Peppers-6 large green peppers, 1 pint boiled rice, 1 tomato, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 medium-sized onion, and 1 teaspoon salt. Cut the tops from peppers and remove seeds. Add to rice the onion and tomato, chopped and salt. Wash peppers, stuff them with boiled rice, put on tops and stand them in a baking Cover bottom of baking pan with a little water; add to it the Crisco. Bake in a quick oven 20 minutes, basting 2 or 3 times. pan.
A plain meatless stuffed pepper from Crisco's dinner calendar, garbled slightly in the original typesetting: the words "pan." and "February 26" have drifted to the end, and the sentence should read "stand them in a baking pan."
- Quick ovenA quick oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 400–425F, though period usage varies and the book gives no figure. At that heat 20 minutes is enough to blister the pepper skins but not enough to soften a thick-walled pepper through.
- Pre-cook the peppersThe single change worth making: parboil the hulled peppers 3–4 minutes, or the 20-minute bake leaves them raw and squeaky against a filling that is largely cooked already. Only the onion and tomato go in raw.
- A pint of boiled riceTwo cups of cooked rice, measured after boiling, not before — roughly 2/3 cup raw. It is a modest filling for six large peppers; the stuffing will be loose rather than packed.
- The raw onionA medium onion chopped raw into the rice will still taste raw after 20 minutes inside a pepper. Sweating it in the tablespoon of Crisco first, and adding the fat to the filling rather than the pan water, gives a better result.
- CriscoStraight shortening, still sold, though the modern product has been reformulated away from the hydrogenated cottonseed oil of 1913. Any neutral solid or liquid fat substitutes; butter or olive oil both improve the dish, at the cost of the point the book was making.
- The water in the panA shallow film of water with fat floating on it, used for basting, keeps the pepper skins from scorching in a hot oven. Do not let it boil dry — check once during the bake.
- SeasoningOne teaspoon salt and nothing else. A period recipe written to sell fat rather than to season food; pepper, garlic, a little grated cheese on top, or the chopped pepper tops added to the filling are all reasonable.
- YieldSix peppers, one per person as a light supper dish, or six sides.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to introduce American cooks to hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it and no obvious place in a kitchen already stocked with butter and lard. The Calendar of Dinners at the back — a full year of dated menus — was the persuasive part: it put Crisco into ordinary dishes on ordinary days, so that the fat arrived as a habit rather than a novelty. The meatless rice filling here reflects both economy and the era's interest in "made" dishes that stretched a little into a meal. Note how small the Crisco role actually is: one tablespoon, floated on pan water for basting. The recipe exists to mention it.