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January 6
Menu: Oyster Cocktail; Fried Cod Steaks; Potatoes au Gratin *Stewed Tomatoes; Cold Slaw; Cheese Wafers; Cocoanut Pudding Coffee Stewed Tomatoes-1 can tomatoes, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 cup breadcrumbs, seasoning salt, pepper and paprika. Empty tomatoes into double boiler, add breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, and paprika, and cook slowly for 1½ an hour, stirring from time to time. Just before serving add Crisco and stir till melted. While the tomatoes will be ready with 1/2 hour's cooking, they are improved by cooking 1 hour, and are better still if warmed again after cooling.
A thickened stewed tomato that doubles as a side dish and a way to use stale bread. Almost nothing here needs changing, but a few of the terms and quantities mean something different now.
- "Seasoning salt, pepper and paprika"Read this as "seasoning: salt, pepper and paprika," three separate items. Commercial seasoned salt is not intended.
- One can of tomatoesRecipes of this period usually assume a No. 2 can, about 2.5 cups or 20 oz, though No. 3 cans of tomatoes were also common. A modern 28 oz can gives a slightly looser result; a 14.5 oz can will need the breadcrumbs cut back by roughly a quarter to a third.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not the fine sandy commercial kind and not fresh soft crumbs. A full cup of packed dry crumbs to one can of tomatoes produces something closer to a spoonable pudding than a stew; use fewer if you want the tomatoes to stay loose.
- The conflicting timesThe method reads "1½ an hour", almost certainly a printer's slip, since the note that follows says half an hour is enough and an hour is better. Over a double boiler nothing will scorch either way.
- Why a double boilerTomato and bread over direct heat catch and stick within minutes. Indirect heat lets the crumbs swell and the tomato reduce without any attention. A heavy saucepan on a low flame works if you stir more often.
- The Crisco at the endTwo tablespoons of shortening stirred in off the heat is a fat enrichment, the same job butter does in many other versions of this dish. Butter gives more flavour; the book naturally prefers its own product.
- ReheatingThe claim that it is better warmed through a second time is sound. The crumbs finish absorbing liquid as the dish cools, and the tomato acidity mellows. Make it a day ahead if you can.
- YieldFour modest side servings from a No. 2 can.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale, and its recipes were written by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The recipe collection, issued as "A Calendar of Dinners" alongside the Crisco narrative, assigns a full menu to every day of the year, which is why this side dish carries the date January 7 and sits beside a coconut pudding and coffee. Stewed tomatoes thickened with bread were long-standing American home cooking by then, a way of stretching a winter can of tomatoes into something substantial; what the book adds is the final spoonful of hydrogenated cottonseed oil in place of butter. Cottonseed oil had been a soap and lamp-oil commodity for decades, and hardening it into a white solid that behaved like lard was the innovation Procter & Gamble was selling. Books like this one existed to teach cooks where in an ordinary day's meals the new fat could go.