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January 26
Menu: Onion Soup; Roast Chicken, Chestnut Stuffing,; Cranberries; Giblet Sauce; Celery au Jus; Baked Macaroni with Cheese; Grapefruit Salad; Burnt Almond Ice Cream; Coffee Grapefruit Salad-Take out inside of grapefruit, and cut edge of shell into points; slice meat of fruit with 2 oranges, 1 cup pineapple, 1 cup cherries, 1/2 cup chopped nut meats, 1 diced apple, the juice of 1 lemon, and 3 tablespoons powdered sugar; fill shell, and serve with following dressing: Beat yolks 2 eggs until creamy, then add to them 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard and same quantity salt. Next beat in slowly 4 tablespoons melted Crisco and 6 tablespoons hot vinegar. Cook in double boiler until it thickens. When cold, and just before serving, 1 cup of cream, sweet or sour, may be folded in.
A fruit salad served in a scalloped grapefruit shell, dressed with a cooked boiled dressing rather than mayonnaise. The dressing is the only part that can go wrong.
- The hinge: keep the dressing below a simmerEgg yolks thickened over water will scramble if the water boils. Keep the water at a bare shiver, stir constantly, and pull the pan the moment the dressing coats a spoon; it thickens further as it cools.
- Add the hot vinegar slowlySix tablespoons of hot vinegar poured into two yolks at once will cook them into curds. Dribble it in while beating, then set the bowl over the water. The same goes for the melted fat, which should be warm rather than hot.
- CriscoIn 1913 this meant the newly introduced hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, sold as a clean-tasting substitute for lard. Any neutral oil gives the same result in a cooked dressing; today's Crisco is a different formulation from the original.
- Powdered sugarPeriod American usage is unreliable here — it can mean confectioners' sugar or simply finely granulated. Either works, since it is dissolving into fruit juice. Three tablespoons is modest for this quantity of fruit; taste before committing.
- Cherries in JanuaryThe book dates this to 27 January, so the cherries were most likely canned or maraschino, and the pineapple probably canned as well. Fresh cherries would suit if you are making it in season, but drained preserved fruit keeps the salad from watering down.
- Cutting the shellHalve the grapefruit, section out the flesh with a curved knife, then scrape the shell clean of membrane before notching the rim into points with kitchen scissors. A ragged interior makes the shell hard to eat around.
- The creamFolding in a cup of sweet or sour cream more than doubles the dressing and softens the mustard and vinegar considerably. Fold it in cold, just before serving, or the dressing thins.
- YieldEnough fruit for four to six, depending on the size of the grapefruit; the dressing makes more than the salad needs and keeps several days refrigerated.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that was neither butter nor lard, and its "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a full menu to every day of the year — this salad belongs to 27 January. Cooked or "boiled" dressings of yolks, mustard, vinegar and fat predate commercial mayonnaise in American kitchens and were common for fruit and cabbage salads well into the twentieth century, partly because they kept better than an uncooked emulsion. Grapefruit was still something of a fashionable novelty at the time, having become widely available in northern markets only after Florida growers began shipping in volume in the 1880s and 1890s.