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June 4
Menu: Boiled Halibut, Lobster Sauce; Beef Roll in Jelly; Italian Risotto * Hungarian Salad; Manhattan Pudding; Coffee Hungarian Salad-Mix equal parts shredded fresh or preserved pineapple, bananas in small pieces, and sections tangerines, and marinate together in French dressing. Fill banana skins with mixture, sprinkle generously with paprika, arrange on lettuce leaves, and serve with French dressing. The dressing is made as follows: Put 4 tablespoons melted Crisco in cold bowl; if possible, put in small piece ice. Add ½ teaspoon salt, saltspoon pepper, and stir until salt is dissolved, add tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice. Beat for 3 minutes until dressing is as thick as good cream. Use at once.
A fruit salad served in banana skins, with a hand-beaten shortening dressing that only makes sense once you know what Crisco does as it cools. Two or three details in the method are doing more work than they appear to.
- Why the ice, and why "use at once"Crisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, solid at room temperature. Melted and then beaten in a chilled bowl over ice, it partly recrystallises and thickens to the consistency of cream; left standing it sets firm and greasy. This is the hinge of the recipe: chill the bowl, beat hard for the full three minutes, dress the salad immediately.
- If you would rather have a normal vinaigretteSubstitute 4 tablespoons of a neutral oil or olive oil for the melted Crisco and whisk it with the salt, pepper and vinegar. You lose the thick opaque texture the original is aiming for, but the dressing stays pourable and can be made in advance.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. Here it is simply a pinch of pepper.
- Preserved pineappleMeans pineapple canned or bottled in syrup. Drain it well and blot it, or the syrup will thin the dressing and sweeten the whole salad.
- Paprika"Generously" was written when the paprika generally sold in America tended to be mild and was used largely for colour. Sweet Hungarian paprika is the right choice; hot or smoked paprika in that quantity will take the dish over.
- The banana skinsHalve the bananas lengthwise, scoop out the flesh for the salad, and trim the shells so they sit flat on the lettuce. Skins darken within an hour, so fill them just before serving.
- TangerinesSections should be freed of membrane and pith, and any seeds removed. Clementines or satsumas are easier and closer to what a modern eater expects.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Two bananas halved lengthwise give four skins; judge the quantity of dressing against the fruit, since some is used to marinate and more is served alongside.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco two years earlier as a hydrogenated vegetable shortening meant to replace lard and butter. The book is frankly promotional: the recipes are built around the product, including salad dressings, where a solid fat is a distinctly odd choice and the ice-chilled bowl is the trick that makes it work at all. The day-by-day menu plan that gives this salad the date June 5 belongs to the Crisco promotional cookbooks organised as a calendar of dinners -- Procter & Gamble issued a separate volume by Neil on exactly that plan -- so the attribution of this page to a particular title should be checked. Calling it Hungarian appears to rest on the paprika, then still a fairly novel seasoning in American kitchens and usually treated as a garnish for colour rather than heat; the pineapple, banana and tangerine combination owes nothing to Hungary and much to the early-century American appetite for fruit salads served in edible or ornamental containers.