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July 22
Menu: "Pilau, a la Turque; Peppers Stuffed with Green Corn; Huntington Salad; • Cheese Rolls; Baked Custard; Coffee Pilau, a la Turque-Put 1½ cups of stock, with 1 cup stewed and strained tomato, over fire. When boiling add 1 cup well-washed or blanched rice and 1½ teaspoon salt; stir lightly with fork, occasionally, until liquor is absorbed. Then add 1/2 cup Crisco, season with salt and pepper, and cook over hot water until tender; remove cover, and stir with fork before serving. Chipped Potatoes Fruit Jelly Toasted Cheese Fingers Coffee Fried Fish-Marinade 4 halibut steaks for 1 hour; drain, dip in salted flour, then in beaten egg, lastly in fine salted and peppered crumbs. Leave on ice for 1 hour, and fry in hot Crisco.
A double-boiler pilaf, typical of the way The Story of Crisco (1913) rewrote familiar dishes around the new shortening. The method is sound; the fat quantity is of its period.
- The hinge: gentle finish over waterOnce the liquid is absorbed the pan goes over hot water, not direct heat. That slow steam finishes the grains without scorching the starch on the bottom, which is exactly what a thin-bottomed 1913 saucepan would do over a gas ring.
- Half a cup of Crisco is a lotThat is 8 tablespoons of solid fat for a single cup of dry rice. The book had a commercial interest in generous shortening; 2 to 3 tablespoons of a neutral oil or butter gives the same gloss and separation without a greasy pool at the bottom of the dish.
- Liquid ratio1 1/2 cups stock plus 1 cup strained tomato to 1 cup rice is 2 1/2 parts liquid to 1 — high by modern standards, but the tomato is watery and some of it evaporates during the first stage on direct heat (the recipe only mentions a cover at the hot-water stage, where it says to remove it before serving). If your rice is soft before the liquid is gone, raise the heat briefly.
- "Well-washed or blanched rice"Polished white rice of the period was often dusty, and coating rice with glucose and talc was a known trade practice, which is one reason recipes of the era call for washing. The original allows blanching instead. Rinse until the water runs nearly clear if you want distinct grains; skip it if you prefer a softer, more clinging pilaf.
- Stewed and strained tomatoThis means fresh tomatoes cooked down and pushed through a sieve — closest modern equivalent is passata or canned tomato purée (not concentrated tomato paste, which is far too strong at a full cup).
- Stir with a fork, not a spoonRepeated twice in the original, and worth heeding. A fork lifts and separates; a spoon crushes the grains and releases starch.
- YieldAbout four servings as a side dish, two as a main. It reheats well with a spoonful of stock and a cover.
Pilau is the English spelling that came into cookbooks through Anglo-Indian and Levantine channels, generally traced to Persian by way of Turkish pilav; "à la Turque" here simply flags the tomato-and-stock treatment as Turkish rather than Indian or Spanish. Its appearance has less to do with Istanbul than with marketing: The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product — hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a clean, odorless, shelf-stable replacement for lard and butter. Cosmopolitan-sounding dishes like this one let the shortening turn up in unexpected places, arguing by example that it belonged everywhere in the kitchen. That is why a rice dish more usually made with butter or sheep's fat is finished here with half a cup of vegetable shortening.
A standard three-stage breading for firm white fish, written in the compressed shorthand of a dinner calendar rather than as a full recipe. The one thing it leaves out is the marinade itself.
- The marinade is unspecifiedNo ingredients, quantities or method are given for it in this entry, so the hour is a soak of your own devising rather than a fixed formula. Marinades of this kind in the period were commonly oil with lemon juice or vinegar, onion and seasoning, but nothing here tells us what was meant.
- "Leave on ice for 1 hour" means refrigerateHouseholds of 1913 had an icebox, not a thermostat. An hour in the refrigerator, uncovered on a rack, is what is wanted: it firms the egg-and-crumb coating so it does not slide off in the fat.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "hot Crisco" and gives no temperature or depth of fat. Modern practice for a breaded steak is roughly 350-375F: below that the crumbs absorb fat, above it they brown before the centre is done.
- Crisco has been reformulatedThe Crisco of this book was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, prized for a high smoke point and a neutral taste. Today's product is a palm and soybean blend reformulated to cut trans fats to trace levels; it fries much the same, and any neutral high-smoke-point fat will substitute.
- Cook to the fish, not the clockNo time is given for frying. Halibut steaks an inch thick take roughly 3-4 minutes a side and are done when the flesh just separates into flakes at the bone; current food-safety guidance for fish is 145F internal, though cooks after moist halibut often take it off earlier. Halibut is lean and turns dry and cottony quickly past that point.
- Salted flour and seasoned crumbsThe seasoning is built into each coating layer rather than added at the end, which is why the recipe specifies salted flour and salted, peppered crumbs. Use dry fine breadcrumbs, not fresh, or the crust steams instead of crisping.
- YieldFour steaks, so four servings.
The Story of Crisco (1913), compiled by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was a promotional cookbook for a product introduced only two years earlier: hydrogenated vegetable shortening, sold as a cleaner, cheaper, more keepable alternative to lard and butter. The "Calendar of Dinners" section at the back gave dinner menus by date, which is why this entry reads as a note rather than a recipe -- it is one line of a July 24 dinner plan, and the page it sits on covers coffee as well. Marinating fish before frying was long-established practice, both to season lean flesh and, it is often said, to freshen fish that had travelled in the days before reliable refrigeration; the acid is also traditionally held to firm the surface so the breading adheres. The whole point of the entry, from the publisher's side, was the last five words.]