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March 20
Menu: Princess Soup; Veal Chops, Horseradish Sauce; Fried Carrots; Baked Asparagus Tips; Spinach Salad; Peach Mousse; Coffee; or; over Princess Soup-Chop very fine 1 cup sorrel, and cook in 1 tablespoon Crisco. Add 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 2 teaspoon tarragon or white wine vinegar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon flour, and when boiling add 1 pint hot water. Cook for 2 hour, then add 1 quart white stock and a grating of nutmeg and dash of red pepper. Bring to a boil, add beaten yolk of legg and 1 cup cream and serve.
A classic sorrel soup, thickened with a flour roux and finished with egg yolk and cream. The finish is the part that needs attention: once the yolk goes in, the soup must not boil again.
- SorrelSorrel is a sharp, lemony leaf sold in spring at farmers' markets and some greengrocers; it collapses to almost nothing when cooked, so a cup chopped is a generous handful of leaves. If you cannot find it, spinach with extra vinegar gives the colour but not the acidity.
- CriscoCrisco here is simply the fat for the roux. A tablespoon of butter or a neutral oil does the same job; butter suits the cream finish better.
- White stockWhite stock in this period means an unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones and aromatics without roasting. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical modern equivalent, and salt should be adjusted at the end since the recipe already adds a teaspoon early.
- The simmerThe stated cooking time after the water goes in reads as two hours, which would reduce a pint of liquid to nearly nothing and destroy the sorrel's flavour. A lost fraction (half an hour) is the likeliest explanation, and half an hour at a bare simmer is a safe reading, but the printed text gives no fraction.
- Finishing with yolkBeat the yolk with the cream, ladle in a little hot soup to temper it, then stir the mixture back into the pot off the heat. Returning the soup to a boil after this will curdle it into threads.
- Pan choiceSorrel and vinegar are both acidic. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron; bare aluminium or unlined copper will take on a metallic taste and dull the soup's colour.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half of finished soup after the stock and cream go in, which serves six as a first course.
Sorrel soup belongs to a long French line — potage à l'oseille, thickened with egg yolk and cream in the classic liaison — and versions of it appear in American cookbooks of the period. Its appearance in a Crisco promotional cookbook is the point of the exercise: Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco in 1911 and published recipe collections to show that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard anywhere in the repertoire, including in dishes where a French cook would have reached for butter. The calendar-of-dinners format, assigning each recipe to a date, is associated with the Crisco 'Calendar of Dinners' material and was used to sell menu planning alongside the product; late March is roughly when the first sorrel of the year appears.