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January 8
Menu: Cherry Cocktail; Corn Soup; Crisp Crackers; Pot Roast with Dumplings; Lettuce and Radish Salad; Cheese Biscuits; Spice Jelly; Coffee Cheese Biscuits-4 teaspoons flour, 6 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1 yolk of egg, 2 teaspoons cold water, salt and red pepper to taste. into biscuits with small cutter; lay on Criscoed tin and bake in quick oven 8 to 10 minutes, or until they are a delicate biscuit color. They require to be carefully watched, as they burn easily. Parmesan cheese is best, but other dry kinds can be used. The biscuits are brittle, so always prepare more than are actually required. They rewarm well with care.
A fragment: the text jumps straight from the ingredient list to cutting out, so the mixing and rolling steps are missing. What survives is a standard cheese-pastry wafer, and the proportions are the part worth examining.
- The flour quantity is wrong as printedThe flour quantity looks wrong as printed -- 4 teaspoons of flour against 6 tablespoons of cheese and 3 of Crisco will not make a dough that can be rolled and cut. Comparable cheese-wafer recipes run closer to equal weights of flour, cheese and fat, which would put the flour here at something like 4 ounces (about 1 cup). A misprint is the likeliest explanation, though the correct figure cannot be recovered from the page.
- Missing stepsRub the fat into the flour, work in the cheese and seasoning, bind with the yolk and water, chill, then roll thin — about 1/8 inch — before cutting. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows short pastry.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. At that heat 8 to 10 minutes is right, and the warning about watching them is not decorative: cheese pastry turns from pale gold to scorched very quickly.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Any solid shortening works; butter gives better flavour but browns faster, so pull the tray a minute or two earlier.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. A pinch — an eighth of a teaspoon for this quantity — is enough to register behind the cheese.
- CheeseCommercially pre-grated Parmesan is generally drier and finer than what the recipe would have assumed, which is if anything an advantage. Any hard aged cheese works; avoid anything moist, which will make the dough slack.
- Yield and keepingIf the flour figure is corrected as above and a small cutter used, perhaps 30 to 40 wafers. They keep well in a tin and can be crisped in a low oven, which may be what the note about rewarming has in mind.
The day-by-day menu format and the "January 9" tag point to one of Procter & Gamble's Calendar of Dinners titles, published to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it. The "Calendar of Dinners" assigns a menu to every day of the year, and this wafer belongs to January 9, served alongside coffee at the close of the meal — a placement that may reflect English practice, where cheese straws and cheese biscuits came after the sweet rather than before dinner, though the line of transmission is inference rather than record. The recipe reads as if lifted from an English source and trimmed to fit the page, which would explain both the vocabulary ("biscuit color", "quick oven") and the missing method. Substituting Crisco for the butter such a recipe would originally have called for was precisely the point of the book: every page is an argument that the new fat could stand in anywhere.