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June 17
Menu: Brunoise Soup; Porterhouse Steak.; Olives; Stuffed Potatoes *Beans; Belgian Salad; Compote of Cherries; Coffee Beans-Boil 1 quart beans until tender, salting them well when half cooked. Beat 1 tablespoon. Crisco to a cream, beat in yolk 1 egg, 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley, 1 saltspoon black pepper, and 2 teaspoons lemon juice; when this sauce is well mixed stir it into beans, taking care not to break them, then serve.
A quart of beans dressed in what is essentially a maître d'hôtel butter with the butter swapped out for shortening. Two things need attention: what kind of beans are meant, and the raw yolk.
- Which beansThe June date and the warning not to break them suggest fresh beans — young string beans or freshly shelled shell beans — rather than dried, though the recipe does not say. A quart of string beans in the pod is roughly a pound to a pound and a quarter; shelled beans will weigh more. Enough for four to six as a side.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is generally reckoned a quarter teaspoon. The tablespoon is effectively the modern one; standardised measures were well established in American cookbooks by this date, though usage was not yet wholly uniform.
- Salting when half cookedIt was a common belief that early salting toughened beans. Current practice is to salt the water from the start; it seasons the beans through rather than only at the surface, and the claimed toughening effect is at best disputed.
- The sauce is a compound fat, not an emulsionCreaming the Crisco with yolk, parsley, pepper and lemon gives a soft paste that melts on contact with hot beans and coats them. Drain the beans well but use them straight from the pot, or the shortening will sit in pale streaks.
- The raw yolkHot beans will not bring a yolk to a safe temperature. If the dish is going to anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use a pasteurised egg or leave the yolk out — the parsley, lemon and pepper carry the sauce on their own.
- Crisco's roleCrisco at this date was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and it is handled much as modern shortening is. It should be at room temperature to cream properly; straight from a cold cupboard it will not take the yolk.
- Lemon lastTwo teaspoons of juice into a tablespoon of fat is a lot of liquid for the mixture to hold. Beat it in a little at a time at the end, or the sauce will separate before it reaches the beans.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook for a product launched two years earlier, and its Calendar of Dinners gave a dated menu for every day of the year so that a housekeeper could cook from the book without ever choosing a dish. This bean recipe is a straightforward transplant: the sauce is the classic French maître d'hôtel butter — softened butter creamed with parsley, pepper and lemon — with Crisco standing in for the butter and an egg yolk added for richness. Substitution of that kind was the whole argument of the book. Crisco was pitched as cheaper than butter, stable on a warm shelf, and, because it contained no animal or dairy fat, usable in kitchens that kept kosher; P&G advertised it to Jewish households on exactly those grounds. The June date may not be decorative either: fresh beans in mid-June suggest a cookbook whose calendar was arguably still keyed to the seasonal rhythms of garden and market, though that is an inference from a promotional menu calendar rather than an established fact.