Home › A Calendar of Dinners › June 28
June 28
Menu: Cream of Lettuce Soup Bread Sticks; Halibut Ramekins; Baked Potatoes Asparagus; Ginger Ice Cream Lady Fingers; Coffee; rather Halibut Ramekins-Flake finely 12 pounds cooked halibut. See that it is free from bones and skin. Have ready 1 pint seasoned white sauce. Crisco few fireproof dishes. Mix halibut with sauce, season with salt and pepper, then fill dishes with it, smooth over surface with wetted knife, and cover with thin layer white sauce. Sprinkle top with mixture of breadcrumbs and grated cheese, and place a few tiny bits Crisco here and there on surface. Bake in fairly hot oven 25 minutes, so as to get it thoroughly heated and surface browned. Dish up and serve hot.
A simple baked fish gratin from the Crisco company's calendar of dinners, built on leftover cooked halibut bound with white sauce. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the sauce, since the fish is already cooked and only needs heating through.
- Quantity of fishThe stated weight of halibut has not survived legibly; as written it is far out of proportion to a pint of sauce. For a pint of white sauce, reckon on about 1 to 1 1/2 lb of flaked cooked halibut, which fills six ramekins.
- CriscoCrisco was the first widely sold hydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced in 1911. Here it is used only to grease the dishes and dot the crumb topping; butter does both jobs better in a gratin, and the quantity is small enough that the choice is purely one of flavour.
- "Fireproof dishes"Individual ovenproof ramekins or small gratin dishes, roughly 4 to 6 oz each. Grease them before filling.
- Oven temperature"Fairly hot" in cookbooks of this period is usually taken to mean somewhere in the region of 375-400F. Twenty-five minutes at that heat should brown the crumbs and heat the interior; if the filling was assembled cold from the refrigerator, allow closer to 30 minutes.
- The white sauceSeason it properly and make it thick enough to hold a flake of fish in suspension: about 4 tablespoons fat and 4 tablespoons flour to 1 pint milk. A thin sauce will weep and the ramekins will turn watery under the crust.
- Do not overbakeThe halibut is already cooked. Extra time in the oven only squeezes moisture out of the flakes and makes them cottony. Pull the dishes as soon as the tops are browned and the edges bubble.
- ToppingEqual parts dry breadcrumbs and grated hard cheese. A dry aged cheese browns; fresh mozzarella or a soft cheese will slump.
- YieldEnough for six small ramekins as a first course, or four as a light main dish with a green vegetable.
The Story of Crisco was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no culinary tradition behind it: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold from 1911 as a substitute for both butter and lard. Its "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a full menu to every day of the year, and dishes like this one show the company quietly inserting Crisco into recipes that had never needed it, greasing the dish and dotting the crumbs where a cook would once have reached for butter. Ramekins themselves were a fixture of genteel Anglo-American cooking around 1900, small portions of minced or flaked food bound in white sauce and browned under crumbs and cheese, a respectable way to serve up the remains of a boiled or baked fish. Halibut turns up often in these menus as a plain family fish rather than the premium item it has since become.