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July 17
Menu: Iced Currants; Blanquette of Veal; Fried Artichokes Duchesse Potatoes; Cauliflower and Red Pepper Salad; Macaroon Trifle Coffee Blanquette of Veal-2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 pounds fillet of veal, 1/2 cup cream, 4 tablespoons flour, 1 large onion, 1 carrot, seasoning, 12 preserved mushrooms, and 12 whole peppers. Cut veal into square pieces, put them into stewpan with enough cold water to cover, bring it to boil, and skim well; add salt to taste, onion cut in quarters, carrot, whole peppers; cook gently 1 hour. Take up meat, strain stock, and measure off 1 pint. Melt Crisco in stewpan, stir in flour, add stock; boil and skim; cook for a few minutes. Add mushrooms, cut in slices, and cream; put in pieces of veal; make hot, but do not boil again; season nicely, dish up, sprinkle little chopped parsley over, and serve.
A white veal stew from the Crisco book's day-by-day dinner calendar, given in the clipped style of 1913 with no yield and no serving note. The heading is a fragment of the surrounding calendar page rather than a description of this dish.
- The hinge: no boiling after the creamOnce the cream and the veal go back into the sauce, bring it only to a bare steam. A boil at that point will break the cream and toughen the meat you spent an hour cooking gently.
- Keep it whiteA blanquette is defined by the absence of colour. Do not let the Crisco and flour take on any tint when you cook the roux, and do not brown the veal at any stage.
- "Whole peppers"Whole black peppercorns, twelve of them, added to the poaching liquid and left behind when the stock is strained. Not chillies, and not ground pepper.
- "Preserved mushrooms"Bottled or canned mushrooms, which were commercially available by 1913. Twelve small bottled buttons is roughly 4 to 8 oz of jarred or fresh mushrooms; if using fresh, cook them separately in a little fat first so they do not release grey liquid into the sauce.
- Crisco and substitutionsTwo tablespoons of any neutral solid shortening, or butter if you are not concerned with keeping the flavour flat. Butter is the classical choice for a blanquette.
- Sauce thicknessFour tablespoons of flour to one pint of stock gives a fairly thick sauce by current taste, before the cream goes in; note too that the recipe pairs 4 tablespoons of flour with only 2 of fat. Three tablespoons of flour yields something looser.
- Cut and timing"Fillet of veal" here means boneless leg meat. Cut in 1 1/2-inch pieces it will be tender in about an hour of gentle simmering; keep the liquid at a lazy bubble, as a hard boil squeezes the meat and clouds the stock.
- FinishingSeason at the end, after reduction. A squeeze of lemon juice, which the original omits, is traditional in many blanquette recipes and lifts the cream.
- YieldTwo pounds of veal serves four generously, five at a stretch. Rice, plain boiled potatoes or noodles are the usual accompaniment.
Blanquette comes from the French blanc, white: the meat is poached rather than seared, and the sauce is built from the resulting pale stock, thickened with a white roux and enriched with cream or egg yolks. Veal, mild and gelatinous, is the classic candidate, and the dish had long been a fixture of French bourgeois cooking before it turned up in English and American household books. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco (published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to promote their new hydrogenated vegetable shortening) may not have been accidental: a white sauce is arguably the place where a fat's colour and flavour show most plainly, so a blanquette could let the company argue that its product behaved like butter and, unlike lard, brought nothing of its own to the pot. The recipe sits in the book's "Calendar of Dinners," a year of dated menus that answered the perennial complaint of the household cook ot how make a dish, but what to make tonight.