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June 11
Menu: Vegetable Soup; Broiled Steak; Stuffed Tomatoes Baked Macaroni; Pear and Pimiento Salad; Apricot Blanc-mange; Coffee Pear and Pimiento Salad-Fill each canned pimiento with 2 halves canned pears; place each pimiento in nest of lettuce and serve with following dressing: Put 1 teaspoon salt and 1 saltspoon black pepper in bowl, and stir into them with wooden spoon, very slowly, 4 tablespoons melted Crisco, and add 2 tablespoons vinegar, mixing it well with Crisco.
A one-line entry from a day-by-day dinner calendar, written to sell shortening. The salad itself is straightforward; the dressing is the part that needs thought.
- The dressing will set solidMelted Crisco is a solid, hydrogenated fat that firms up as it cools, so this dressing turns waxy on chilled pears and coats the palate unpleasantly. Use a neutral oil, or a mild olive oil, in the same quantity and the vinaigrette behaves as expected.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. One teaspoon of salt to six tablespoons of dressing is aggressive by modern taste; start with half.
- Crisco, then and nowCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, firmer than today's reformulated version. Nothing in this dish requires shortening; it appears because the book is an advertisement for it.
- Canned pimientosThese are whole roasted, peeled sweet red peppers packed in brine, now more often sold in jars than in cans. Drain and pat them dry or the dressing slides off. A roasted, peeled fresh red pepper works as well.
- AssemblyTwo canned pear halves may not fit inside a small pimiento intact. Slice them, or split the pepper open and drape it around the fruit.
- EmulsionAdding oil slowly to the salt and pepper, then the vinegar, gives only a loose emulsion that separates within minutes. Whisk again just before serving, or add a small spoonful of mustard to hold it.
- YieldThe dressing comes to about six tablespoons, enough for roughly four salads. One filled pimiento per person is a side salad, not a course.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco two years earlier as an all-vegetable substitute for lard and butter. Its "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a menu to every day of the year, each one contriving to use the product somewhere, which is why shortening turns up in a cold salad dressing where oil would be the obvious choice. The salad itself belongs to a period fashion for arranging canned fruit and vegetables into neat composed shapes on lettuce, a style widely popular in American entertaining from the 1900s through the 1950s and closely bound up with the growing reliability of commercial canning. Canned pimientos, a Spanish import that American canners are generally said to have taken up in Georgia in the early years of the century, were prized for exactly this kind of work: sweet, brilliantly red, and already soft enough to shape by hand.