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July 6
Menu: Clam Bisque; Lamb Chops; Escalloped Corn; Creamed Sweet Potatoes; German Salad; Cheese Drops; Strawberry Bavarian Cream; Coffee Cheese Drops-Add to 3½ tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons melted Crisco, and blend together until smooth. Remove from fire, add 4 tablespoons grated cheese, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and a dash of red pepper. Fold in stiffly beaten whites of 3 eggs, and drop from end of spoon on a Criscoed baking sheet about 1 inch apart, and bake from 12 to 14 minutes in a moderate oven. Serve hot in folded napkin with salad course.
A cheese puff in the éclair family — a cooked paste lightened with egg white rather than whole eggs. Note first that the text as printed is incomplete.
- The missing liquidAs set, the recipe has you blend flour and melted fat and then "remove from fire," with nothing to cook in. A line has dropped out in typesetting: this is a panade, and it needs roughly 1/2 cup of milk or water brought to a boil with the fat before the flour goes in. Cook the paste until it pulls away from the pan in a mass, then cool slightly before the cheese and whites go in.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Crisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening and is still sold; butter works better here and 2 tablespoons is the same measure. "A Criscoed baking sheet" means simply greased.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F; the book itself gives no temperatures. At that heat 12 to 14 minutes will set small drops of about a rounded teaspoon; larger drops will want longer, and should be dry and firm before they come out, or they collapse.
- The cheeseThe recipe just says "grated cheese"; in an American book of this date that would most likely be a dry aged Cheddar or similar hard cheese. Use a hard, dry grating cheese - anything moist will weep fat and flatten the drops.
- Folding the whitesThe paste is stiff and the whites are stiff, which makes for awkward folding. Slacken the paste with a spoonful of the whites first, then fold the rest in two additions. Overworking here is the difference between a puff and a wafer.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not crushed chile flakes. A dash is about 1/8 teaspoon.
- Yield and servingThree whites and this quantity of paste should give a couple of dozen small drops, enough for a small party as a salad accompaniment. The folded napkin in a dish is period presentation.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco — hydrogenated cottonseed oil — two years earlier. The book's job was to prove the new fat could do everything lard and butter did, so it works through a full repertoire, including a "Calendar of Dinners" assigning a dish to every day of the year; this one is July 7. Cheese drops of this kind are a domesticated gougère: the same cooked flour-and-fat paste used for cream puffs, seasoned with cheese and cayenne and lightened with whites alone rather than whole eggs. Serving small hot savouries with the salad course seems to have been common enough in American households of the period, and the folded napkin was often said to be the usual way to bring anything crisp to the table.