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January 16
Menu: Lettuce Cocktail; Cream of Spinach Soup; Broiled Hamburg Steak; Baked Potatoes; Brussels Sprouts; Pineapple Salad; Cheese Balls; Urney Pudding; Coffee Lettuce Cocktail - 1 crisp head of lettuce, 4 tablespoons tomato catsup, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce, 4 hard-cooked eggs, 4 tablespoons vinegar, 3 tablespoons sugar, 4 small onions, and salt to taste. Cut lettuce fine with scissors and shred eggs and onions. Melt Crisco, when cool, add tomato catsup, Worcestershire sauce, sugar, vinegar and salt. At serving time pour this sauce over lettuce, eggs and onions. Serve very cold in cocktail glasses.
A shredded salad dressed with a sweet-sour catsup sauce and served in stemmed glasses, in the manner of an oyster or grapefruit cocktail. One instruction works against the rest of the recipe, and it is worth dealing with first.
- The melted shortening is the problemCrisco is solid at room temperature and does not melt until well above it, so a dressing built on melted shortening will set into white specks the moment it meets cold lettuce, and worse in a chilled glass. A neutral liquid oil in the same quantity gives what the recipe seems to be aiming at.
- Dressing proportions4 tablespoons catsup, 4 vinegar, 3 sugar, 2 Worcestershire and 2 fat is a sharp, sweet, low-oil dressing rather than a vinaigrette. Whisk it together and taste before salting; if the sweetness is too much for current taste, start with 2 tablespoons of sugar.
- "4 small onions"Probably small white or silverskin onions rather than scallions or full-sized modern cooking onions, though the recipe does not say. Four raw ones shredded into a salad of this size is aggressive by current taste; a single small onion, or three or four scallions, may suit better.
- Shredding the eggsHard-cooked eggs "shredded" means pushed through the coarse side of a box grater or a sieve. Chill them thoroughly first or the yolks smear.
- Cutting lettuce with scissorsThe instruction is sound and worth keeping: scissors give fine, even ribbons without the bruised brown edges a dull knife leaves. A crisp head means iceberg or a firm romaine heart, not a soft butterhead, which collapses under the dressing.
- Dress at the last momentThe recipe says "at serving time" and means it. The vinegar and salt draw water out of shredded lettuce within minutes and the glasses fill with pink liquid.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, but four eggs and four onions suggest four cocktail glasses as a first course. Chill the glasses along with the salad.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written for Procter & Gamble by Marion Harris Neil, was published two years after Crisco itself reached the market as the first widely sold hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and its calendar of dinners assigns menus to days of the year with the new fat worked into as many of them as possible. That is why melted shortening turns up here in a cold salad dressing. The dish belongs to a genuine fashion, though: in the years before Prohibition the stemmed cocktail glass was pressed into service for first courses of all kinds, and oyster, grapefruit, clam and vegetable "cocktails" appear throughout American cookbooks of the period. The sauce itself — catsup, vinegar, sugar, Worcestershire, chopped egg and onion — sits squarely in the family that produced Thousand Island and Russian dressing, both of which appear in American sources of roughly the same period.