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March 14
Menu: Breaded Chops; Baked Potatoes; Celery Hearts; Creamed Carrots and Peas; Lettuce, French Dressing; Apricot Whip, Custard Sauce Coffee Breaded Chops-Wipe and trim mutton chops, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in crumbs, egg, then crumbs, and fry in hot Crisco from 5 to 8 minutes, then drain. Do not fry more than 4 chops at a time, and allow the Crisco to reheat between fryings. After testing Crisco for temperature put in the chops, then lower the heat that the surface of the chops may not be burned while the inside is yet under done.
The page is a scrap of a day's menu, and the only working instructions on it are for the breaded chops. Everything below applies to that.
- The order of the coatingThe original says crumbs, egg, then crumbs — the first light dusting gives the egg something to grip on a damp chop. Skipping it is why breading slides off in the fat.
- Crisco and its temperatureCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, sold then as a solid in a can and still available; any neutral frying fat behaves the same. The book says only to test the Crisco for temperature without saying how — period practice was usually a bread cube or a drop of batter. A thermometer at 350-365F is more reliable.
- Why the heat is loweredThis is the hinge of the recipe. A breaded chop browns faster than it cooks through, so the fat goes in hot to set the crust and is then eased back so the centre catches up.
- Four at a timeSound advice, not fussiness. Crowding drops the fat temperature sharply and the crumbs absorb grease instead of sealing; let the fat come back up between batches.
- Mutton chopsMutton — sheep over a year, strongly flavoured — is rare in North American markets. Lamb loin or rib chops are the usual substitute and cook a little faster.
- The 5 to 8 minutesThe recipe gives no chop thickness or depth of fat, so the 5 to 8 minutes is only a rough guide. Judge by an internal reading of about 145F for lamb and rest a few minutes rather than by the clock.
- Draining"Drain" at this date usually meant tipping the chops onto brown or unglazed paper. A rack set over a tray is better; paper under the chops steams the crust soft.
- YieldOne chop per person for a menu of this length, two if the chops are small and the meal is plainer than the printed one.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale, and the recipes were credited to Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil — a fat that stayed solid at room temperature, kept without refrigeration and had no animal origin, which the company pushed hard to cooks used to lard and butter. The "Calendar of Dinners" section, from which this page comes, gives a full menu for every day of the year, a form of cookbook writing common in the period and doubly useful to a manufacturer: a household following the calendar bought Crisco perpetually. The frying instructions here, with their insistence on batch size and reheating the fat between loads, read as much like product coaching as cookery, since deep frying was the use in which the new shortening most obviously outperformed butter.