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July 19
Menu: Cream of Asparagus Soup; Lamb Fricassee with Dumplings; Mint Jelly Green Peas; Romaine Salad; Cheese; Toasted Crackers; Watermelon; Coffee; Lamb Fricassee with Dumplings-; Cut up and dice enough cold lamb; to make 1 quart. Season with salt; and white pepper, put into Criscoed; baking dish and pour over following; sauce: Blend 2 tablespoons Crisco; with 2 tablespoons flour, and cook; until brown. Now add 2 cups water; and when it boils season with salt,; pepper, onion juice to taste and pour; over meat. Cover and bake in; moderate oven 20 minutes.; To make the dumplings, sift to-; gether 2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt,; 1/4 teaspoon sugar, and 2 teaspoons; baking powder. Add 1 tablespoon; Crisco and rub in with tips of fingers,; then add sufficient milk to make soft; dough. Roll out and cut into small; biscuits. Place on top of lamb and; bake in hot oven for 12 minutes.; Serve hot.
A leftovers dish dressed up as a fricassee: cold roast lamb reheated under a brown sauce and capped with baking-powder biscuits. The whole thing hinges on the roux and on not letting the dumplings sit long enough to go soggy.
- Oven temperatures"Moderate" is conventionally taken as around 350F for the 20-minute braise, "hot" as roughly 425-450F for the dumplings; the book gives no figures. Turn the oven up when the biscuits go on, and put the dish back on a higher rack so the tops brown.
- Quantity of lambA quart of diced cooked lamb is roughly 1 1/2 lb, or what comes off a modest leftover shoulder or leg. Cut it into 1/2-inch dice so it heats through in the short bake.
- The roux is the dishThe roux -- Two tablespoons fat and two of flour cooked to a genuine brown are what give the sauce its character. Stir it over medium heat for several minutes until it smells nutty and turns the colour of peanut butter; a pale roux gives a flat, floury sauce.
- Water, not stockThe original calls for plain water, seasoned only with salt, pepper and onion juice. Lamb stock or the strained pan juices from the original roast give a far better result at no extra trouble.
- Onion juiceA period seasoning, made by grating an onion and pressing out the liquid, or by squeezing a cut onion on a reamer. A teaspoon of grated onion cooked into the roux does the same job.
- Crisco and substitutionsThis is a promotional cookbook, so the shortening is named at every turn. Any solid shortening works; butter in the roux and butter or lard in the biscuits both improve the flavour, though butter browns faster so watch the roux.
- Dumplings are biscuitsDespite the name, nothing is steamed or poached here. Handle the dough as little as possible, roll it about 1/2 inch thick, and set the rounds on top of hot sauce so the undersides start cooking at once.
- Yield and timingServes four to six. Assemble the biscuits while the meat bakes and bake them straight away; dough that stands loses its lift once the baking powder has been wetted.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shelf-stable stand-in for both lard and butter. The "Calendar of Dinners" section that this July 20 entry belongs to gave a menu for every day of the year, which was as much a marketing device as a convenience, since Crisco appears in nearly every one. The dish itself is thrift cookery of a kind that ran through nineteenth-century American and British household books: a Sunday joint reappearing midweek under a brown sauce, with biscuit dough laid over the top to stretch it. Calling it a fricassee is a slight courtesy, since a true fricassee involves cooking the meat in its sauce from raw, but the term had loosened by this period to mean almost any meat in a made gravy.