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June 19
Menu: Baked Trout; Chicken Epicurean; New Potatoes String Beans in Cream; Tomato Salad; Pineapple Bisque; Coffee Baked Trout-Clean brook trout, season with salt, black pepper, and paprika. Lay in Criscoed baking pan, dredge with flour, sprinkle with chopped parsley and bits of Crisco, pour over little vinegar and water, and bake in hot oven until done, basting often with Crisco. Garnish with parsley, and serve hot with cream sauce.
A short entry from Crisco's day-by-day dinner calendar, written for cooks who already knew how to bake a fish. The gaps are easy to fill.
- "Hot oven"In period usage roughly 400-450F; the book itself gives no temperatures. A whole brook trout of 8-12 oz takes roughly 15-20 minutes at that heat; the flesh should be opaque at the backbone and the dorsal fin should pull free cleanly.
- "Criscoed" panSimply greased with the shortening. Any neutral fat or butter does the same job; Crisco was called for because the book exists to sell it.
- Clean the troutAssume gutted, gills removed, and the dark blood line along the spine scraped out with a thumbnail under running water. Heads may stay on. Scales on brook trout are fine enough to ignore.
- Vinegar and waterA splash of each, no more than a few tablespoons total in the pan, enough to keep the bottom from scorching and to sharpen the pan juices. Cider or white wine vinegar suits it better than distilled.
- BastingBasting a lean fish with melted fat is the point of the recipe; trout dries fast. Every five minutes or so, or simply dot the fish more generously at the start and leave it alone.
- Cream sauceThe period default is a white sauce: 2 tbsp fat, 2 tbsp flour, 1 cup milk or cream, salt and a scrape of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon. Make it while the fish bakes.
- YieldOne trout per person. The entry gives no serving count.
- The flour dredgeDredging before the liquid goes in gives a light crust on top and thickens the pan juices slightly. Dust it on lightly or it turns pasty where the vinegar and water pool.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it. Its "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a full menu to every day of the year, and this trout falls on June 17, squarely in the season when brook trout were being taken from northeastern streams. The recipe assumes a whole small fish rather than fillets. The insistence that Crisco replace butter or salt pork at every step, including the basting, is the book's whole argument: it was pitched as cheaper, keeping better without refrigeration, and free of the religious dietary objections attached to lard.