Home › A Calendar of Dinners › July 3
July 3
Menu: Green Peas; a; Roast Lamb; New Potatoes; Summer Squash; Watercress and Cucumber Salad; Coffee Ice Cream; Lady Fingers Summer Squash-Cut summer squashes into small pieces and boil till tender in salted water. Put into clean towel and wring out all Put squashes into saucepan and add to each cup of them, 2 tablespoons cream and 1/2 tablespoon Crisco. Heat thoroughly before sending to table. water. spoons
The text has come through the scanner badly jumbled — stray words ("water. spoons July 4 cream Declaration Day") belong to a calendar heading and a neighbouring line, not to the dish. Read in order, the method is simple: boil, wring dry, enrich, reheat.
- What the recipe actually saysCut summer squash small, boil in salted water until tender, turn into a clean towel and wring out all the water. Return to the pan with 2 tablespoons cream and 1/2 tablespoon Crisco per cup of squash, and heat through before serving.
- The hinge: wring it drySummer squash is roughly 95 percent water, and boiled squash that is merely drained will weep into the cream and give you soup. Wringing in a towel is the whole point of the method; press hard, and expect a noticeable loss of volume.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, launched in 1911 and still sold, though reformulated since to cut trans fats. Half a tablespoon per cup of squash is there for richness and mouthfeel — butter does the same job and tastes better here.
- "Each cup of them"The measure is cooked, wrung-out squash, not raw. A couple of pounds of raw yellow squash or courgette will cook and press down to something in the region of two cups, though the loss varies a good deal with how hard you wring.
- CreamPeriod "cream" in an American household book could mean anything from thin table cream to something close to modern heavy cream, so the richness is a matter of judgement. Heavy cream gives the thickest result; half-and-half will work but loosens the mixture.
- SeasoningThe recipe salts only the cooking water. Season again at the end with salt and white pepper; a scrape of nutmeg is period-appropriate for a creamed vegetable.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity or number of servings; scale it to the squash you have. It does not hold well — the squash slackens as it sits, so heat it just before it goes to the table.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a fat that was neither butter, nor lard, nor olive oil, and its "Calendar of Dinners" is generally described as pairing Crisco dishes with menus through the year — here, a Fourth of July menu. Creamed summer squash of this kind was standard American home cooking well before Crisco existed, and the book's contribution was simply to substitute its own product and print the result. The scan also suggests how these promotional volumes may have been laid out, with recipes running alongside dated menu headings, so that a stray "July 4" and "Declaration Day" can end up folded into the text of a squash dish.