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January 4
Menu: Lentil Soup; Roast Loin of Pork, Apple Sauce; Potato Balls Artichokes, a la Creme; Orange Salad Cheese Fingers; Pineapple Pudding Coffee Orange Salad-1 tablespoon brandy, 1 tablespoon melted Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon chopped tarragon, 1 teaspoon chopped chervil, and 6 oranges. Cut peel from oranges, carefully removing all pith, cut out pulpy pieces in each of natural divisions so that there is no skin of any kind or pips taken out with pieces fruit, sprinkle over these pieces tarragon, chervil, melted Crisco, brandy and sugar. This salad should be placed on ice if possible 1 hour before serving.
An orange salad in the French style, printed here as part of the January 5 dinner menu. The one thing to reckon with is the dressing: melted shortening congeals the moment it meets cold fruit.
- The Crisco problemMelted Crisco is solid fat at room temperature, let alone after an hour on ice. It will set into white flecks on the orange sections. A neutral oil, or a light olive oil, does what the recipe actually wants; the shortening is here because the book exists to sell it.
- Pips and pith"Pips" are seeds. The instruction is to supreme the oranges: cut off the peel and white pith to the flesh, then cut each segment free of its membrane so only naked fruit remains. Work over a bowl to catch the juice.
- ChervilRarely stocked and short-lived once cut. Flat-leaf parsley with a pinch of fresh tarragon or fennel frond is the usual substitute; dried chervil contributes almost nothing.
- SugarHalf a teaspoon across six oranges is barely a seasoning. Taste the fruit before adding any at all.
- ChillingThe recipe asks for an hour on ice before serving, which will at least let the tarragon and brandy mingle with the cut fruit and serve it cold; note that it will also set the melted Crisco hard.
- Yield and place in the mealSix oranges would make roughly six modest servings, though the recipe states no yield. In menus of this period a salad of this kind generally follows the roast rather than the soup.
- The titleThe heading on this page belongs to the surrounding dinner calendar rather than to the salad itself; the recipes for each date run together in the original.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written for Procter & Gamble by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911 as a substitute for both lard and butter. The day-by-day "Calendar of Dinners," which gave a full menu for every day of the year, belongs properly to A Calendar of Dinners, the retitled and reorganised successor to The Story of Crisco, so this page is not securely attributable to the 1913 book. The salad itself is French in outline: oranges cut into segments, dressed with oil and a little spirit, and pointed with the fines-herbes pairing of tarragon and chervil, which is generally traced to nineteenth-century French practice rather than to anything American. Citrus in January was a plausible luxury by 1913, when Florida and California fruit reached northern cities by refrigerated rail.