Home › A Calendar of Dinners › March 10
March 10
Menu: Cream of Cabbage Soup; Celery; Olives; Halibut, a la Poulette, White Sauce; Baked Potatoes; Macaroni, Italian Style; Cheese Crusts; Chicory Salad; Plum Pudding Coffee Halibut, a la Poulette-Slice of halibut, weighing 2 pounds, 1/4 cup melted Crisco, 2 teaspoons lemon juice, few drops onion juice, pepper and salt to taste. Clean fish and cut into neat fillets. Add seasonings to melted Crisco, and put dish containing Crisco in saucepan of hot water to keep Crisco melted. Take up each fillet separately with a fork, dip in Crisco, roll and fasten with small wooden skewer. Put in shallow pan, dredge with flour, and bake 12 minutes in hot oven. Remove skewers, arrange on platter for serving, pour around 1½ cups white sauce, and garnish with yolks of 2 hard-cooked eggs rubbed through a strainer, whites of hard-cooked eggs cut in strips, lemon cut fan-shaped, and parsley.
A quick baked fish from the dated dinner calendar at the back of the Crisco book, dressed up with a classic mimosa garnish. The two things worth watching are the oven heat and the 12-minute clock.
- Hot ovenPeriod guidance for a "hot" oven varies by source, broadly somewhere in the region of 400-450F. At the lower end a rolled fillet may want longer than the stated 12 minutes; check that it flakes at the thickest point.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, so it appears where a modern cook would reach for butter or oil. Melted butter gives a better flavour with fish; a neutral oil behaves closest to the original.
- Cutting the filletsA 2-lb halibut steak or slice needs to be boned and cut into strips slim enough to roll, roughly 1 inch wide. Halibut is lean and firm, which is why it holds a roll at all; a soft fish such as sole would need chilling first.
- SkewersSmall wooden skewers means what we would call cocktail picks or short bamboo skewers. Soak them so they do not scorch, and set the rolls seam-side down so they cannot spring open.
- Onion juiceA period seasoning, made by grating an onion and pressing out the liquid. A few drops is genuinely a few drops; a tiny grating of onion on a microplane does the same work.
- White sauce1½ cups of medium bechamel: about 3 tablespoons fat, 3 tablespoons flour, 1½ cups milk, seasoned. Despite the name, this is not a true sauce a la poulette, which is thickened with egg yolk and sharpened with lemon.
- The garnishSieved hard-cooked yolk is what French kitchens call mimosa. Do the eggs and the lemon fans before the fish goes in the oven so they are ready when it comes out.
- YieldTwo pounds of halibut with sauce serves four generously, or six as part of a longer dinner in the style the calendar assumes.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, two years after the company launched Crisco as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Its closing "Calendar of Dinners" gives a dated menu for every day of the year, so that a housekeeper need never plan a meal and would, incidentally, reach for the same tin every day; this entry belongs to March 11. The dish borrows the name a la poulette, which in French cookery properly means a veloute finished with egg yolk and lemon, though here it has drifted to mean fish with a plain white sauce and an egg garnish, a slippage common in American cookbooks of the period.