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March 23
Menu: Cream of Cauliflower Soup; Flounder au Gratin; Mutton Cutlets, a la Soubise; Potatoes; Tossed Tomatoes; Combination Salad; Apple Dumplings Coffee Mutton Cutlets, a la Soubise-6 mutton cutlets, 1/2 cup dried beans, brown sauce, 2 onions, 3 tablespoons Crisco, and 1/2 cup white sauce. Trim cutlets, season them with pepper and salt, and fry in hot Crisco. sauce. Soak dried beans in water for several hours, then boil them in a stewpan until tender. Drain, and pass them through a sieve. Melt Crisco in a saucepan, stir in sieved beans, add to them the onions, previously boiled and sieved, season, and stir over fire until hot. Then add a white sauce. Dish cutlets in circle on a hot dish, and put puree of beans and onions in center. some brown sauce round and serve.
The text as printed is garbled — a line has dropped out after "fry in hot Crisco" and again before "some brown sauce round" — so read it as a sequence of three separate preparations: fried chops, a bean-and-onion purée, and a brown sauce poured around at the end.
- What the missing words wereThe first gap almost certainly instructed you to keep the cutlets hot while making the sauce; the second is "Pour some brown sauce round and serve." Nothing essential to the method is lost.
- Mutton cutletsThese are rib chops from a mature sheep, trimmed and often with the bone scraped clean. Mutton is scarce in American markets; lamb rib or loin chops behave the same way but are milder and cook faster — about 3 to 4 minutes a side for a chop an inch thick.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works for frying the chops, and butter is the better choice for the purée, where the shortening contributes nothing but body.
- The dried beansUnspecified; a small white bean such as navy or haricot is the likeliest reading for a recipe of this date, though the book does not say. Half a cup dry gives roughly a cup and a half cooked, which is the right volume for the center of the dish. Soak several hours or overnight, then simmer 45 to 75 minutes until they crush easily.
- "Pass them through a sieve"A food mill or ricer does this in a minute and gives a better texture than a blender, which turns bean purée gluey. The onions should be boiled until completely soft before they are put through as well, or the purée will be stringy.
- The two saucesWhite sauce here is a béchamel — a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a half cup of milk, cooked out for a few minutes. Brown sauce means a meat-based espagnole or demi-glace; a good reduced stock thickened lightly is the practical modern stand-in.
- Consistency is the hingeThe purée should hold a soft mound in the center of the ring of chops. Add the white sauce a spoonful at a time and stop while it still stands up; too loose and it runs into the brown sauce and the dish becomes one muddy pool.
- YieldSix cutlets serve two to three people as a main course. Season the purée firmly — beans and boiled onion take a surprising amount of salt.
À la Soubise means, in classical French cookery, served with a purée in which onion is the dominant note; the name is traditionally traced to Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an 18th-century French marshal whose kitchen the sauce is said to have come from. By the time this version was written the purée had been thinned and extended with beans, rice or béchamel to make it cheaper and more manageable — the bean base here does the work that rice does in most French formulas. The recipe's presence in a Crisco booklet is the point of the whole genre: Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbooks lifted respectable, faintly continental menu items into a calendar of dinners and rewrote each one so that the new hydrogenated shortening stood where butter, lard or suet had stood, arguing by repetition rather than by claim.