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June 22
Menu: Tournedos of Beef with Olives; Braised Lettuce Baked Potatoes; Alligator Pear Salad; Strawberry Ice Cream; Coffee Tournedos of Beef with Olives-2 pounds fillet beef, 8 croutons fried bread, 2 tomatoes, white olives, straw potatoes, 4 tablespoons Crisco, and seasoning. sauce, Cut fillet in slices 1 inch thick, trim into small rounds with cutter. Melt Crisco in saute pan, fry tournedos quickly and brown nicely, season with pepper and salt, and dress each on round crouton of bread, cut same size as fillet, and fried. On this place thin slice tomato that has been slightly cooked in Crisco; in center of tomato place a teaspoon white sauce; on that, again, arrange olives. Cut potatoes in strips, and fry them golden brown in hot Crisco; arrange these round tournedos, and serve hot.
A tidy piece of hotel-style plating scaled down for a home cook, written to demonstrate that the new vegetable shortening could stand in for butter at high heat. The assembly matters more than any single technique: bread, beef, tomato, sauce, olive, in that order.
- Read the garbled lineThe ingredient list has suffered in typesetting: "and seasoning. sauce," is very likely the tail of "seasoning, and white sauce," since the method calls for a teaspoon of white sauce on each tomato slice. Only a few spoonfuls are needed; the recipe gives no further detail about how it is made or served.
- TournedosRounds cut from the tenderloin. Two pounds of fillet cut 1 inch thick and trimmed with a round cutter gives eight small medallions, matching the eight croutons; the recipe does not say how many it serves, though two apiece would feed four. Buying eight 3 oz filet mignons and simply trimming them round wastes far less beef.
- CriscoAny neutral solid or liquid shortening works, but clarified butter or a butter-and-oil mix browns the beef better and tastes considerably more like the French original this is imitating.
- "Fry quickly"For 1-inch medallions that means 2 to 3 minutes a side in a properly hot pan, to about 130F internal for medium-rare, then a few minutes' rest. The 1913 instruction to "brown nicely" is the whole of the cooking; there is no finishing in the oven.
- White olivesNot a modern category, and not clearly documented; it most likely means pale green olives rather than ripe black ones. Pitted green olives, rinsed of brine, are the sensible substitute. The recipe specifies no quantity.
- Straw potatoesPotatoes cut in fine matchsticks, rinsed of surface starch, dried thoroughly, and fried at 350-375F until golden. Fry them first, drain and salt, and hold them in a low oven while you cook the beef.
- CroutonsRounds of firm white bread cut with the same cutter as the beef and fried in fat until crisp on both sides. Cut and fry these before anything else so the beef goes straight from pan to plate.
- Order of workNothing here reheats well. Potatoes, then croutons, then the tomato slices, then the beef last, and plate immediately.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was published two years after Crisco itself appeared on the American market as a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening sold as a cleaner, cheaper substitute for lard and butter. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a menu to every day of the year, and the dishes were chosen to show the new fat performing every job in the kitchen at once, which is why this one asks it to shallow-fry bread, saute tomato, sear beef and deep-fry potatoes in a single sitting. The dish itself belongs to the French restaurant repertoire of the period: tournedos, small rounds cut from the tenderloin, were a staple of Escoffier-era service, the name generally traced to tourner le dos, though the explanations offered for that phrase are traditional rather than documented. Its presence in a shortening pamphlet says a good deal about the ambitions of the American middle-class table in 1913, where a June dinner might reasonably aspire to hotel plating done with a can of shortening from the grocer.