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February 5
Menu: Broiled Smelts; Chicken, a la Florentine; Brussels Sprouts with Cheese; Spanish Salad; Cheese Loaf; Date Souffle; Coffee Date Souffle-Stone and chop 1/2 pound dates and cook them in 1/2 cup boiling water, mashing until smooth. Add 1 tablespoon melted Crisco, stiffly beaten whites 5 eggs, 14 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, and salt to taste. Pour into Criscoed souffle mold and bake until brown, or 25 minutes. Serve cold with boiled custard or whipped cream.
A baked date meringue in all but name, from the Crisco company's month-by-month dinner calendar. The original gives no oven temperature and one garbled measurement, both of which need settling before you start.
- The sugar quantityThe printed page reads 1/4 cup sugar, as our text now gives. That is a modest amount, but the dates are already very sweet.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. 350F is a reasonable modern setting; twenty-five minutes at that heat should give a browned top and a set, slightly moist center.
- Stoning dates"Stone and chop" means pit them. Most dates sold today are already pitted; check anyway, and use soft Medjool or Deglet Noor. Half a pound is about 1 1/2 cups chopped.
- Cool the paste before the whites go inThis is the hinge. The cooked date puree must be no more than lukewarm, or it will deflate and partly cook the beaten whites on contact. Fold in a third of the whites to loosen the paste, then fold in the rest gently.
- Crisco, then and nowCrisco in 1913 was a firm all-vegetable shortening, newly introduced and the reason this book exists. Modern Crisco is reformulated but works the same way here; a tablespoon of any neutral solid fat or melted butter serves.
- "Criscoed souffle mold"Grease a 1 1/2-quart straight-sided baking dish with shortening. Unlike a savory souffle, this one is meant to be eaten cold, so it will sink as it cools; that is expected, not a failure.
- Boiled custardThe period term for a stirred stovetop custard sauce, what would now be called creme anglaise, cooked to about 175F and never actually boiled. Whipped cream is the easier option the recipe already allows.
- YieldServes five or six as a dessert course.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a product they had never seen before: a shelf-stable, all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening meant to replace lard and butter. The "Calendar of Dinners" that closes the book assigns a full menu to every day of the year, February 6 among them, so that a reader had no occasion to wonder whether Crisco belonged in a dish. It nearly always did. Baked date puddings and date souffles appear often in this period, and it is reasonable to suppose that a fruit paste stretched a small quantity of sugar and fat a long way. The instruction to serve it cold with boiled custard places it squarely in the older English tradition of sweet baked puddings rather than the French souffle it borrows its name and mold from.