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March 6
Menu: Vegetarian; Spinach Soup; Egg Cutlets, Cream Sauce; Potatoes; Brussels Sprouts; Tomatoes, French Dressing; Cheese Fingers; Sultana Pudding Coffee Egg Cutlets-Put 2 tablespoons Crisco into a pan, when melted, add 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk gradually, boil for 3 minutes, stirring all the time, then add 2 raw yolks of eggs, remove from the fire, add 2 tablespoons cooked chopped peppers, 6 chopped mushrooms, red pepper, white pepper, salt and nutmeg to taste and four chopped hard-cooked eggs. Turn on plate to cool. Shape into cutlets. Brush over with beaten egg, roll in fine breadcrumbs and fry in hot Crisco. Serve very hot with cream sauce.
This is a croquette in cutlet shape: a very stiff panada bound with yolks, studded with chopped egg, chilled, breaded and fried. The recipe is workable as written once a few 1913 conventions are translated.
- The hinge: chill it hard"Turn on plate to cool" means spread the mixture no more than an inch thick and refrigerate until firm all the way through — two hours, or overnight. Warm or soft mixture will split in the fat and the cutlets will empty themselves into the pan.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, and neutral oil is fine for the frying. Two tablespoons fat, two tablespoons flour and one cup milk gives a medium-thick white sauce rather than a stiff panada; it is the yolks, the four chopped hard-cooked eggs and thorough chilling that bring the mixture to shaping consistency.
- Add the milk gradually, off the boilWhisk in the milk a little at a time to keep the roux smooth, then boil the full three minutes — undercooked flour tastes pasty and the paste will be slack.
- "Red pepper" and "white pepper"Red pepper here is cayenne, used by the pinch, not paprika or a chile. White pepper is the ground white peppercorn, standard in period cream sauces so as not to fleck them.
- Cooked chopped peppersMost likely sweet green peppers, though pimientos were equally common in the period; sweated in a little fat until soft and thoroughly drained. Wet vegetables are the other main cause of a mixture that will not hold shape.
- Frying temperature350–365F, with enough fat to come halfway up the cutlets. Fry two or three minutes a side to a deep gold; the filling is already cooked and only needs heating through.
- Cream sauceThe period's plain white sauce — one tablespoon each fat and flour to a cup of milk or thin cream, seasoned with salt and white pepper. Keep it thinner than the binder inside the cutlets.
- YieldAbout six cutlets, serving three as a main course or six as a first course. Shape them flat and slightly tapered, the way a lamb cutlet looks, which is presumably the reason for the name.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written for Procter & Gamble by Marion Harris Neil, was published two years after Crisco itself appeared. The "Calendar of Dinners" is a separate Procter & Gamble title, also by Neil, and it is there that the dated menu suggestion for every day of the year appears 斿 a promotional device that put the new shortening into three or four dishes a day without appearing to sell anything. Egg cutlets belong to the large family of croquettes common in American and English middle-class cookery from the 1880s onward: a thick sauce used as glue for chopped leftovers, chilled, crumbed and fried. They were prized because they made a small amount of protein look like a course, and because a meatless version could be served on a Friday or through Lent, which is where a March 7 dinner would often have fallen. Crisco was marketed hard on exactly these grounds — an all-vegetable fat with no animal content, later promoted to Jewish as well as Christian households, and sold as odorless and reusable in a way lard and butter were not.