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May 16
Menu: Chipped Beef in Cream; Baked Potatoes; Lettuce and Radish Salad; Cheese Balls; Frozen Macedoine; Coffee Chipped Beef in Cream-Make white sauce using 8 tablespoons Crisco, 8 tablespoons flour, 3 cups milk and 1 cup cream. To it add ½ pound dried beef broken into small pieces. Cook about 5 minutes and just before serving pour very slowly on to 2 well beaten eggs. Serve at once.
A creamed dried beef enriched with an egg liaison at the last moment. The printed page runs several calendar entries together, so ignore the stray "Coffee" heading and the Spanish omelet note that follows: the recipe proper ends at "Serve at once."
- The hinge: the eggsThe beaten eggs go into the tureen or bowl and the hot sauce is poured onto them in a thin stream while whisking, not the other way round. Reversing it, or returning the mixture to the heat, curdles the eggs into threads within seconds.
- Roux proportionsEight tablespoons is half a cup each of fat and flour to four cups of liquid: a very thick sauce by current standards, closer to a binding paste than a pouring sauce. Two-thirds of that amount gives a sauce that still coats toast without setting up like pudding.
- CriscoThe 1913 product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, reformulated many times since. Any neutral solid shortening works; butter makes a better-tasting white sauce, and butter and lard were the established fats this book was promoting Crisco against.
- Dried beefAir-dried, salt-cured beef sliced tissue-thin, sold in jars or vacuum packs. It is aggressively salty. Taste a piece first, and if it stings, cover the torn pieces with hot water for a minute and drain before adding. Add no salt to the sauce.
- Cooking timeFive minutes in the sauce is ample and is mostly about warming through. Dried beef toughens and curls with longer cooking, and the flour needs its own two or three minutes of cooking before the milk goes in to lose the raw taste.
- CreamPeriod "cream" here is likely to have been something in the range of today's light or single cream, though fat content varied by dairy and region. Light cream or half-and-half both work; heavy cream makes the sauce cloying at this ratio.
- Yield and servingEnough for six to eight over toast points, split biscuits, or baked potatoes. It thickens noticeably as it stands, so serve straight from the pan.
Procter & Gamble introduced hydrogenated cottonseed shortening as Crisco in 1911, and The Story of Crisco followed in 1913; the dated day-by-day "Calendar of Dinners" format these entries come from belongs to the Crisco promotional cookbook literature of the same years. Its purpose was to show that the new fat could stand in for butter and lard across an entire year of ordinary meals, white sauce very much included. The dish itself is older than the shortening: dried or "chipped" beef, salted and air-dried in thin sheets, was a keeping meat of the American larder long before refrigeration, and creaming it was a common way to stretch a half pound across a family. The same combination became a fixture of military mess kitchens, and is usually said to have picked up its unprintable nickname in the Second World War. The egg liaison at the end is a French finishing technique found in American cookbooks of the period, used here to give a plain chafing-dish supper a richer body and a pale gold color.