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February 4
Menu: Steamed Oysters; Lamb's Tongues, Tremont Style; Browned Potatoes; Anchovy Fritters; Romaine Salad; Madeira Jelly; Coffee Anchovy Fritters-Pound yolks 2 hard-cooked eggs with 1/2 dozen bottled anchovies, 1 teaspoon capers 4 tablespoons Crisco and 4 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese. Rub all through fine wire sieve and add yolk 1 raw egg and 1 tablespoon breadcrumbs. Season with pepper and with salt if it is needed. Form paste into small balls, roll first in breadcrumbs, then in egg and again in crumbs, and drop into hot Crisco. Serve on napkin with grated Parmesan Calendar of Dinners cheese. The recipe as here given may be doubled, and "redoubled" as many times as it is thought the demand for fritters will warrant.
A savoury from The Story of Crisco (1913), written to show off the then-new hydrogenated shortening in both the paste and the frying kettle. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and the frying instructions need translating.
- Crisco, then and nowCrisco in 1913 was a solid hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as an all-purpose substitute for lard and butter. Modern Crisco is a reformulated blend with the trans fats largely removed; any neutral solid shortening or a neutral frying oil behaves the same way here.
- Frying temperatureThe book says only "hot Crisco." For croquette-style balls that need to colour before the interior overheats, hold the fat at 375F and fry two or three minutes until deep gold. Below about 350F they soak; above 400F the crumb burns before the centre is hot.
- "A half dozen bottled anchovies"Six anchovies, drained. Bottled anchovies of the period were frequently whole salted or brined fish requiring rinsing and boning, so six of them correspond to roughly a dozen modern tinned fillets.
- Season with salt only if neededThis is the line to obey. Anchovies, capers and Parmesan together carry a great deal of salt. Taste the paste before adding any.
- The sieveRubbing the mixture through a fine wire sieve is doing the work of a food processor: it breaks down the anchovy fibre and hard yolk into a smooth paste. A processor or a mortar gets there faster, but do not overwork it into a wet purée or the balls will not hold.
- Chill before breadingNot in the original, but the paste is soft and the raw yolk makes it softer. Twenty minutes in the refrigerator firms the balls so the double crumb coating stays on in the fat.
- Serve on a napkinA folded linen napkin on the serving dish was a common period way to drain and present fried food at table. A paper-lined plate does the same job.
- YieldThe quantities make roughly 16 to 20 marble-sized fritters, enough for four to six as a hot savoury or with drinks.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale in 1911, with recipes credited to Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. It is advertising in the shape of a cookbook: nearly every recipe calls for the product, often in places where a cook would previously have reached for butter or lard, and the "Calendar of Dinners" material published alongside it supplied a year of menus to make the habit stick. Anchovy fritters belong to the older English tradition of the savoury, a small, salty, highly seasoned course served at the end of dinner or handed round separately, and the combination of pounded anchovy, capers and hard yolk was a standard base for anchovy toasts, butters and forcemeats throughout the nineteenth century. Its appearance here shows the book doing two things at once: borrowing the prestige of an established genteel dish, and demonstrating that the new shortening could stand in for butter in a rich paste and for lard in the frying kettle.