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January 18
Menu: Broiled Halibut; Maitre d'Hotel Potatoes; Escalloped Tomatoes; Lettuce, French Dressing; Pumpkin Pie Cheese Squares; Coffee Escalloped Tomatoes-Drain juice from 1 can tomatoes. Brush baking dish over with Crisco, and cover bottom with tomatoes; dot with Crisco, dredge with pepper and salt, and sprinkle generously with breadcrumbs; arrange another layer of tomatoes, and crumbs, and so proceed until dish is filled. Pour over all enough of juice of tomatoes to moisten well, and then finish dish with covering of crumbs. Bake 20 minutes in moderate oven.
A plain layered gratin from the Crisco calendar, written when canned tomatoes were one of the few reliable winter vegetables. The whole dish depends on getting the moisture right.
- Moisture is the hingeDrain the tomatoes first, then add back only enough juice to dampen the crumbs — roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup for a 1 1/2-quart dish. Too much and the crumbs dissolve into a soup; too little and the top layer stays dry and powdery.
- Moderate oven350°F. Twenty minutes is enough to heat through and set the crumbs, but the top will not brown much in that time. Give it a few minutes under the broiler, or run the oven at 375°F, if you want colour.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated since -- notably in 2007 to cut trans fat -- and current formulations no longer rely on partially hydrogenated oil. Butter works better here for flavour; the original insists on shortening because the book exists to sell it.
- "Dredge with pepper and salt"Dredge here simply means to scatter over the surface, not to coat in flour. Season each tomato layer as you go rather than salting only the top.
- BreadcrumbsPeriod crumbs were generally dried and grated from stale loaves, and tended to be coarser and more absorbent than fine packaged crumbs. Fine dry crumbs turn pasty; coarse ones hold up better, and can be toasted lightly if very fresh.
- A can of tomatoesCan sizes were not standardised as they are now; No. 2 (about 20 oz) and No. 3 (about 32 oz) cans were both in use. One 28-oz can of whole or diced tomatoes, broken up by hand, serves four to six as a side.
- SugarA pinch is often added to canned tomatoes to offset acidity. The original leaves it out, so taste the juice before deciding.
Escalloped — or scalloped — dishes are one of the oldest patterns in American home cooking: anything layered with crumbs and fat and baked until set, from oysters to potatoes to corn. The word is usually traced to cooking in scallop shells, though the account is complicated by the parallel Old French escalope, meaning slice; in any case, by the nineteenth century the term had detached from shellfish entirely and come to mean the method. This version appears in The Story of Crisco, the promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble issued after introducing hydrogenated vegetable shortening in 1911, and its "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a full menu to every day of the year so that the new product would turn up in a household's cooking constantly rather than occasionally. A January date explains the canned tomatoes.