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For Sauce (Lemon egg cupful melted Crisco)
1½ lemon 1 egg ½ cupful melted Crisco ½ teaspoonful mustard 1 yolk of egg 1 pinch powdered mace ½ teaspoonful salt Salt, pepper, and red pepper 1 pinch red pepper to taste 1 tablespoonful vinegar ½ cupful picked shrimps 2 chopped gherkins 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley For fish. Wash dry and trim flounder. On one side make cut down center from near head to near tail and raise flesh from the bones. Make a stuffing with Crisco, parsley, breadcrumbs, herbs, shrimps, lemon juice, seasonings, and nearly all the egg, and insert under the fillets of the flounder, leaving the center open. Dot with Crisco. Brush fish over with remaining egg, sprinkle with browned breadcrumbs, put on Criscoed baking tin, and bake thirty minutes. Serve with sauce.
For sauce. Put egg yolk into a bowl, and, with a wooden spoon stir a little; then add by degrees melted Crisco, stirring constantly; then add seasonings, vinegar, gherkins and parsley.
Two recipes sit here in one entry: a stuffed baked flounder and a cold emulsified sauce built like mayonnaise. The ingredient column has been scrambled in printing, so read the method first and treat the list as a rough guide.
- The list does not match the methodThe column mixes fish-stuffing items with sauce items and repeats "1½" where the original almost certainly read "1" or "½". Breadcrumbs, herbs and the Crisco for the stuffing appear in the instructions with no quantity at all, so quantities have to be judged by eye.
- Crisco, then and nowCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a firm white shortening sold as a replacement for both butter and lard. Modern Crisco is a different fat blend but behaves similarly. For the stuffing and for greasing the tin, any solid shortening or butter works.
- The sauce will set solidThis is mayonnaise made with melted shortening instead of oil. It emulsifies while warm, then firms up as the fat recrystallises, giving a pasty, greasy mouthfeel. A neutral liquid oil gives the intended result; the recipe reads as it does because the book's purpose was to put Crisco into everything.
- Fat-to-yolk ratioA single yolk is conventionally reckoned to carry about three-quarters of a cup to a cup of fat, though more can be worked in if it is added carefully. A cup and a half is a lot for one yolk; add the fat drop by drop at the start and stop if the mixture looks slack or glassy.
- Raw yolkThe sauce is never heated. Use a pasteurised egg, and keep the finished sauce cold and use it the same day.
- No oven temperatureThe book gives no oven setting for this dish. Thirty minutes suits a moderate to moderately hot oven for a whole flounder; judge by the flesh parting cleanly from the backbone rather than by the clock.
- "Picked shrimps"Shelled, cooked small shrimp, of the sort sold ready-picked. Chop them before working them into the stuffing so the fillet lies flat over the top.
- Mace and red pepperPowdered mace is the outer coat of nutmeg, milder and more floral; a pinch is genuinely a pinch. "Red pepper" here means cayenne, not paprika or sweet pepper.
- YieldOne flounder serves two, or four as a first course. The sauce makes considerably more than two people need.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco two years earlier as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Its job was to persuade cooks that a single tin of white fat could stand in for butter, lard and salad oil alike, which is why a delicate emulsified sauce that any French kitchen would have made with olive oil is here built on melted shortening. The fish itself is thoroughly Anglo-American of the period: a flat fish boned along the spine, stuffed with a bread-and-shrimp farce, breadcrumbed and baked, and sent out with a cold sharpened mayonnaise dotted with gherkin and parsley. Stuffed and sauced dishes like this one appear across turn-of-the-century household cookery because they stretched a modest fish into a course fit for company.