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June 10
Menu: Creamed Potatoes; Cold Roast Beef; a; String Beans; Tomato and Olive Salad; Vanilla Ice Cream; Crushed Raspberries; Coffee String Beans-If fresh beans are used pick them over, remove ends and "strings," and boil for 1½ an hour or more; then drain them, and add 1 tablespoon Crisco and 2 tablespoons milk, season to taste, and serve after 10 minutes' slow cooking. If canned beans are used omit the first long boiling.
A side dish from the day-by-day dinner calendar at the back of the Crisco book, where each menu item gets a line or two of instruction. One number in it is badly out of step with modern practice.
- The boiling timeThe printed page reads half an hour or more, which is what our text now gives. That is long by modern standards, and would reduce fresh green beans to olive-drab threads. Modern beans want 4-8 minutes in well-salted boiling water, until they bend without snapping, then a drain and the fat and milk.
- Why the original says so longWhy the original may say so long -- bean varieties of the period were often tougher-podded and picked larger, and long boiling times for vegetables are common in cookbooks of the era. Taste is the guide, not the clock.
- StringsMost supermarket green beans are stringless cultivars; snapping off the stem end is all that is needed. The blossom tip can be left on.
- CriscoThe shortening the book was written to promote. Today's Crisco has been reformulated to cut trans fat and is not the same product as the 1913 original; a tablespoon of butter or a neutral oil does the same job here.
- The finishOne tablespoon fat and two tablespoons milk for a serving of beans is a light gloss, not a sauce. Ten minutes of slow cooking after that is again too long; two or three minutes to warm through and coat is enough.
- Canned beansAlready fully cooked. Drain, rinse, and heat them in the fat and milk for a minute or two.
- QuantityNo amount is given. As a rough guide, that much fat and milk would gloss something on the order of a pound of beans, but this is a guess, not in the text.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with an entirely new product: a solid white vegetable shortening made by hydrogenating cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911. Part of the book is straight domestic-science cookery of the period, including this "Calendar of Dinners," which assigns menus to the days of the year and then explains the unfamiliar items. June 11 falls in green-bean season in much of the country, and the entry shows the era's habit of boiling vegetables into submission before dressing them with fat and milk.