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May 2
Menu: Porterhouse Steak; Scalloped Potatoes with Onion; Artichokes, Hollandaise Sauce; Daisy Salad; Roquefort Cheese; Lemon Ice Cream with Grated Pineapple; Coffee Daisy Salad-Arrange around border of salad plates a row of crispy lettuce leaves, and in the center put a tablespoon of dressing. This makes center of daisy. Around this put petals made by cutting into narrow strips whites of hard-cooked eggs. Take yolks of these eggs and put through strainer, scattering over dressing in center to give a rough appearance. This will require about five hard-cooked eggs. The dressing for the center is made as follows: Beat together 3 eggs, add to them 1 cup milk, 2 tablespoons vinegar, 1½ teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 teaspoons mustard mixed to paste with 2 teaspoons water, and pepper to taste. Bring to boiling point.
A boiled dressing and a garnish arrangement, from the Crisco company's 1913 calendar of dinners. The salad itself is assembly work; the dressing is a thin egg custard and is where the recipe can go wrong.
- Do not let it boil"Bring to boiling point" is the one instruction to disregard as written. Three eggs in a cup of milk will scramble well below boiling, so cook it in a double boiler or over low heat, stirring constantly, until it coats the spoon at around 175-180F, then pull it off. If it does break, a quick blitz with an immersion blender will usually bring it back.
- Mustard"2 teaspoons mustard" means dry mustard powder, which is why it is mixed to a paste with water first. Prepared jarred mustard is not a substitute at that volume.
- CriscoPlain hydrogenated vegetable shortening, the product this book was written to sell. Two tablespoons of butter or a neutral oil does the same job in a cooked dressing; butter tastes better.
- VinegarTwo tablespoons for a cup of milk is modest by modern taste, and vinegar strength was not standardized in 1913 as it is now, so the sourness of the original would have varied. Add the vinegar at the end, off the heat, to reduce the chance of the milk curdling as it warms.
- Hard-cooked eggsFive eggs for the petals and garnish, plus three raw for the dressing. For whites firm enough to cut into clean narrow strips, cook them through and chill them fully before slicing.
- YieldThe dressing makes close to two cups, far more than the five or six tablespoons needed for a plate each. It thickens further as it cools and keeps a few days refrigerated.
- AssemblyBuild the daisies shortly before serving. The sieved yolk goes dry and the lettuce wilts under a warm dressing, so cool the dressing completely first.
This page comes from The Story of Crisco, published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to introduce American cooks to a wholly new product: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a white, shelf-stable solid fat. The book's Calendar of Dinners assigned a menu to every day of the year, which is why the entry is dated May 3 and headed with the beverage. Composed salads shaped into flowers, fans and baskets were a mark of refined table work in the 1900s and 1910s, encouraged by the era's cookery schools. The dressing is a boiled dressing, often said to have been a common American salad sauce before commercial mayonnaise became widely available: eggs, milk, vinegar and mustard thickened over heat, cheaper and more forgiving in a warm kitchen than an emulsified raw-yolk mayonnaise. Inserting two tablespoons of Crisco into it was the whole point of the book.