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March 2
Menu: Oxtail Soup; Trout, Black Butter Sauce; Stewed Steak and Oysters; Pear Salad; Cheese Eclairs; Sweet Omelet; Coffee Oxtail Soup-1 oxtail, 2 quarts second stock or water, 2 onions, 2 carrots, 1 turnip, 2 strips celery, 4 tablespoons Crisco, a 1/2 cup diced lean ham or bacon, a boquet-garni, 12 whole peppers, 2 cloves, salt, 1 glass sherry, and 1 tablespoon cornstarch. Cut the tail into small joints, put it into a stewpan, cover with cold water, boil up and strain. Dry the pieces of oxtail, roll them in flour, put them with ham and sliced vegetables and Crisco into the stewpan, and fry until brown. Then add stock, herbs, whole peppers, cloves, and salt, boil and skim well. Put on lid and cook very gently for about 4 hours. Strain, remove fat, return to stewpan, and when soup boils add sherry and cornstarch smoothly mixed together, stir and cook for a few minutes. Serve smaller pieces of tail in soup, remainder may be reheated in a good brown sauce, and used as an entree.
A classic brown oxtail soup, sitting in Crisco's 1913 calendar of dinners as the March 3 first course. The method is sound; the vocabulary and a few quantities need translating.
- Second stockStock made from bones already used once for a first extraction — thinner and lighter than a first stock. Any decent unsalted beef stock works, or plain water, since four hours of oxtail will build plenty of body on its own.
- A glass of sherryIn period cookbooks a wine glass is about 1/4 cup (2 fl oz), sometimes up to 1/2 cup. Start at 1/4 cup of a dry amontillado or oloroso and taste; sweet cream sherry will throw the soup off balance.
- Whole peppers and the bouquet-garniWhole peppers are black peppercorns. The bouquet-garni here is the standard parsley stalks, thyme and bay tied in a bundle or in cheesecloth so it can be pulled before straining.
- Crisco, and the substitutionCrisco was a new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in 1913 and the book exists to sell it. Four tablespoons of any neutral high-smoke-point fat, or beef dripping, browns the tail and vegetables just as well and tastes better.
- The blanching step mattersCovering the joints with cold water, bringing to a boil and straining pulls out the scum that would otherwise cloud a soup you intend to strain and serve clear-ish. Dry the pieces thoroughly afterward or the flour will not brown.
- Four hours is realOxtail is collagen and connective tissue; it needs long, barely-trembling heat to turn gelatinous. The original is a stovetop method; if you prefer, a low oven (around 300-325F) with the lid on holds a gentle simmer more steadily than a burner, and a pressure cooker will get there in roughly 45 minutes to an hour at high pressure, though the flavour is less developed.
- DefattingStraining and skimming hot removes some fat. Chilling the strained soup overnight lifts the rest as a solid cap, which is worth doing given how fatty oxtail is.
- The cornstarchOne tablespoon in two quarts is a light body, not a gravy. Mix it smooth with the cold sherry before it goes in, and give it two or three minutes at a boil so the raw starch taste cooks out.
- YieldIt starts with two quarts of stock and will reduce over four hours; expect roughly six first-course servings. A single oxtail yields more meat than the soup needs, hence the instruction to save the larger joints for a second meal in brown sauce.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook for a product introduced in 1911 — a hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a clean, odourless, all-purpose replacement for lard and butter. P&G's Crisco cookbooks ran a sequence of dated dinner menus — the device later expanded into A Calendar of Dinners — which let the company put Crisco into every course of every meal, including a soup where four tablespoons of fat do nothing a spoonful of dripping would not. The soup itself is older and thoroughly English: oxtail soup was a nineteenth-century staple of both grand and thrifty kitchens, since the tail was cheap offal from the butcher and the finished broth, thickened and laced with sherry, was rich enough to open a formal dinner. The instruction to reserve the meatier joints for a second appearance in brown sauce is the period's habitual economy, and it survived into these pages even as the surrounding text was selling a modern industrial fat.