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January 1
Menu: Black Bean Soup; Roast Leg of Mutton, Currant Jelly; Stewed Tomatoes Baked Sweet Potatoes; Macedoine Salad; Cheese Straws; Fruit Cake; Coffee Black Bean Soup-2 cups black beans, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1 onion, 1 lemon, 2 quarts stock or water, 2 stalks celery, 2 hard-cooked eggs, 1/2 tablespoons flour, 3 cloves, 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper, red pepper, and mustard to taste. Wash beans and soak over night; in morning drain, cover with boiling water and boil 30 minutes; drain, throwing away water. Slice onion, dice celery, and cook 5 minutes in half of Crisco in soup pot; add beans, stock or water, and cloves. Simmer until beans are soft, add more water as stock or water boils away. Rub through sieve, add remaining Crisco and flour rubbed together, then heat to boiling point, add seasonings. Cut lemon in thin slices, removing seeds, and cut eggs in thin slices. Put them into a hot soup tureen, and strain soup over them.
A straightforward purée-style bean soup from Crisco's dinner calendar, dated January 2. The technique holds up; only the quantities and the fat need translating.
- Crisco stands in for butter or lardThe 3 tablespoons are simply the cooking fat and the roux fat. Butter, oil or bacon drippings all work; butter gives the best flavour with black beans.
- The flour quantity is unclearThe text reads "1/2 tablespoons flour," which does not agree with the plural; "1 1/2 tablespoons" is the obvious reading. Note that only half the Crisco -- about 1 1/2 tablespoons -- is rubbed with the flour, so 1 1/2 tablespoons of flour balances the fat; that gives a soup that coats a spoon without turning gluey.
- Black beans, not black turtle-substitutesOrdinary dried black turtle beans are what is meant. Two cups dried yields roughly 5 to 6 cups cooked, which suits the 2 quarts of stock.
- The first boil-and-drainThirty minutes of hard boiling followed by discarding the water is called for here and was a common way of handling dried legumes; it does happen to remove some of the sugars now known to cause flatulence, though that was not the reason given at the time. It also discards colour and flavour; skipping it and simmering the soaked beans straight in the stock gives a darker, deeper soup.
- Simmering timeExpect 1 1/2 to 2 hours after the parboil, longer if the beans are old. They must collapse completely or the sieve step becomes hard labour.
- Sieve or blender"Rub through a sieve" was the usual route to a smooth purée in 1913. A stick blender does it in a minute; pass the result through a sieve afterwards only if you want it silky and free of skins.
- Add the seasonings at the end, off the boilWorcestershire, mustard and red pepper lose their edge if boiled long. Bring the thickened soup to a boil to cook out the flour, then season.
- The garnish is the pointLemon and hard-cooked egg sliced into the tureen and the soup strained over them is the classic finish; the acid cuts the beans' heaviness. Slice both thin and assemble at the last moment so the lemon does not go bitter.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, serving six to eight as a first course or four as a main.
Black bean soup finished with lemon and hard-cooked egg was a familiar item in American hotel and club cookery from the late nineteenth century onward. Its appearance here has a specific commercial purpose: The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could take the place of butter and lard in every kind of dish. The day-by-day "Calendar of Dinners" menus, in which Crisco appears throughout, are associated with the later calendar-of-dinners editions rather than the 1913 book. A soup that traditionally began with salt pork or butter was a useful demonstration. The pattern of soaking overnight, parboiling and discarding the water reflects the period's usual handling of dried legumes, well before anyone had identified the oligosaccharides responsible for the effect that step happens to reduce.