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July 27
Menu: Anchovy and Pimiento Canapes; Halibut Baked, a la Creole; French Fried Potatoes; Hot Slaw; French Pancakes; Coffee French Pancakes-4 tablespoons sugar, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1½ cup flour, 2 eggs, 1/2 tablespoon lemon extract, and 1 cup milk. Heat Crisco and mix other ingredients gradually to them, bake in six small criscoed plates for 5 minutes. When done, put jam between every alternate one, and serve high on a dish. Cherry Blanc-mange-Put 1 quart of milk into a saucepan, add 1 tablespoon Crisco. Mix 1 cup cornstarch smoothly with 1/2 cup cold milk;. when the milk boils stir in cornstarch and stir for 10 minutes, then add 2 tablespoons sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Stew 2 cups cherries until tender in 1½ cup water, add 2 tableRinse out a mold spoons sugar. with cold water, arrange a few cherries in the bottom, then put in blanc-mange, then rest cherries mixed with cornstarch. Turn some out when firm. Serve with milk. Iced Tomato Bouillon
Two dessert recipes from a Crisco promotional cookbook, printed as a single dinner-menu entry. The text has been garbled by the scanner in places, and both recipes need a hand with proportions and oven heat.
- "Criscoed" platesThis simply means greased with Crisco. Six shallow tin pie plates, well greased, will do; the batter is spread out so it bakes into flat rounds rather than cakes.
- The missing oven temperatureNo heat is given. A five-minute bake for a thin batter implies a fairly hot oven, perhaps 425-450F, but that figure is an inference and not from the book. Watch them closely.
- Batter consistency is the hingeWith 1½ cups flour, 2 eggs and 1 cup milk this is a thick pouring batter, not a crepe batter. Melt the Crisco and let it cool slightly before mixing in the eggs and milk, or the eggs will curdle in the hot fat.
- Lemon extractHalf a tablespoon is 1½ teaspoons, which is a great deal for this quantity of batter; a teaspoon is plenty, or use the grated zest of a lemon.
- Serving "high on a dish"The rounds are stacked with jam between alternate layers; six rounds gives three jam layers.
- The cornstarch in the blanc-mange is out of proportionA cup of cornstarch to a quart of milk gives a rubbery, sliceable pudding of the old-fashioned sort. For a texture modern palates recognize, 1/2 to 2/3 cup is closer to the mark. Ten minutes of steady stirring is not excessive, though: cornstarch needs a full boil to lose its raw taste.
- A garbled sentence"Rinse out a mold" has been transposed into the middle of the cherry instructions. Read it as: stew the cherries with sugar, rinse the mold with cold water, lay a few cherries in the bottom, fill with alternating blanc-mange and cherries, chill until firm, then turn out.
- "Serve with milk"Cold milk is thin against a stiff cornstarch mold; light cream, or the strained cherry syrup, does better.
- The Crisco in the puddingA tablespoon of shortening in the milk is here to advertise the product, not to improve the dish. It contributes nothing and can be left out.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was published to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no culinary tradition behind it: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced commercially in 1911 as a substitute for both butter and lard. Neil's "Calendar of Dinners" — a separate Procter & Gamble menu book, which this page's layout may well reflect — supplied a year of menus in which Crisco appears in nearly every course, which is why a tablespoon of shortening turns up in a milk pudding where no cook would otherwise put one. The pancakes themselves are older than the fat: "French pancakes" in English and American cookbooks of the period meant thin egg-rich batter cakes, baked in plates rather than fried, stacked with jam, and the form appears in household manuals decades before Crisco existed. Blanc-mange, from the French for "white food," had by this date drifted from its medieval almond-and-capon ancestry to mean any pale molded pudding, and in American kitchens that almost always meant cornstarch.