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March 7
Menu: Beans; Tapioca Puree; Brazillian Stew; Mashed Potatoes; White Grape Salad; Wafers; Cheese; Ginger Ice Cream Coffee Tapioca Puree-1 quart white stock, or half stock and half milk, 14 pint cream, 1 tablespoon melted Crisco, yolks of 3 eggs, 1 tablespoon fine sago or crushed tapioca, salt and pepper to taste. The stock should be well flavored, otherwise it must be simmered with a little onion, carrot, celery, and herbs, and strained for use. Bring stock to boiling point, sprinkle in sago, or tapioca, and stir and cook until it becomes transparent; then let soup cool slightly. Mix yolks of eggs and the cream together, then the melted Crisco, and add to soup and stir till it thickens; it should have the consistency of single cream. When a thicker soup is desired, mix teaspoon flour or cornstarch with a little milk, and add it to soup at same time as sago or tapioca. Season to taste, and serve. Turnip Soup Beef Stew with Dumplings
A thickened white soup finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, printed in the menu columns of a Crisco-era dinner calendar. The page title is a fragment of the day's menu; the recipe itself is only the tapioca soup.
- The one thing that mattersOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must not boil. Hold it below a simmer, around 175F, and stir until it coats a spoon; a boil will curdle the yolks into threads.
- "14 pint cream"Almost certainly a mangled 1/4 pint, that is 1/2 cup. The single cream the text invokes as a consistency is light cream, roughly 18 to 20 percent fat; half-and-half stands in acceptably.
- White stockAn unbrowned stock of veal or chicken bones, pale and mild. Any light chicken stock works, but if it is a commercial one, cut the added salt until the end, since it reduces slightly while the tapioca cooks.
- Sago and crushed tapiocaBoth are starches from tropical palms and from cassava respectively. Modern small pearl tapioca is the closest thing on a shelf; it needs about 15 minutes at a bare simmer to go clear, and it will keep swelling as the soup stands.
- The CriscoOne tablespoon of melted shortening here is enrichment, not frying fat, and it was in the recipe to sell the product. Butter does the same job with better flavour.
- Straining the aromaticsIf you simmer the stock with onion, carrot, celery and herbs, 20 to 30 minutes is enough. Strain it before the tapioca goes in, or the soup will not be the smooth pale thing the name promises.
- Thickening optionThe flour or cornstarch slurry is added early, with the starch, so it has time to cook out. Do not add raw flour at the finish, where it would taste pasty and risk the yolks.
- YieldA quart of stock plus cream serves four as a first course, six in small cups. It thickens noticeably on standing and reheating; loosen with a little hot stock rather than milk.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, appeared not long after Crisco itself reached the market, and its job was to show cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard across an entire year of meals. That is why the product turns up worked into places it has no real business being title under which later editions of this Neil collection were issued including a tablespoon in a delicate white soup. The soup itself is much older than the fat: a purée thickened with sago or tapioca and finished with a liaison of yolks and cream belongs to the nineteenth-century repertoire of pale invalid and dinner-party soups, the kind that appear throughout English and American household manuals. Sago, from the pith of Southeast Asian palms, and tapioca, from cassava, arrived in Western kitchens as colonial imports and were used interchangeably for exactly this purpose, giving body without the heaviness of a flour-bound velouté.