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May 24
Menu: Puree, a l'Indienne; Lamb Stew with Dumplings; Lettuce, French Dressing; Cheese Balls; Snow Pudding; Coffee; salt, pepper, and red pepper to; taste, 4 cups hot water, 2 tablespoons; Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, 4 cups; milk, and 10 buttered crackers.; Remove head and skin and cut fish; into fillets. Cover head, skin and; bones with cold water; simmer 20; minutes, strain. Reserve liquor.; Parboil potatoes 10 minutes. Cook; onion in salt pork until yellow.; Arrange in layers, fish, potatoes,; onions and salt pork; cover with; water in which bones were cooked,; and simmer until potatoes are ten-; der. Thicken milk with Crisco and; flour cooked together, combine mix-; tures, add seasonings, and pour; over buttered crackers which have; been previously soaked in cold milk.; Do not allow onion or salt pork to; burn. Puree, a l'Indienne-2 large apples, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1 large onion, May 26 1 large carrot, 1 turnip, white 2 leeks, 1 stalk celery, sprig parsley, 1 bay leaf, 1 tablespoon cocoanut, juice 2 lemon, 1 tomato, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon red pepper, 1 tablespoon curry powder, 1 teaspoon curry paste, 1/2 cup cream, some boiled rice, and 2 quarts of water. Melt Crisco, cut up all vegetables (prepared) into rough pieces, fry them a little in hot Crisco, add also curry powder, and fry it. Do not peel apples; simply wipe, cut up and add with vegetables. When fried for 7 minutes, add all ingredients except cream, simmer till soft, then rub all through fine sieve, return to pan to reheat, and gently add cream. Serve rice on paper mat, as croutons are served with most soups.
Two soups run together here: a New England fish chowder and a curried vegetable purée belonging to the Anglo-Indian mulligatawny tradition. Both were written to sell Crisco, and both work with any neutral fat.
- Crisco and substitutionsCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and interchangeable here with butter, oil or bacon fat. In the chowder's white sauce, butter gives a better flavour; in the curry, a neutral oil is closer to what the dish wants.
- Missing quantities in the chowderThe fish, potatoes, onion and salt pork amounts fall before the text picks up, so they must be judged. A workable ratio for the 4 cups milk and the 4 cups water called for is about 3 lb whole white fish (cod or haddock), 4 medium potatoes, 1 large onion and 4 oz salt pork.
- Buttered crackersThese are common crackers or pilot biscuits — hard, plain, unsweetened. Unsalted saltines split and buttered are the nearest supermarket equivalent; they are soaked in cold milk so they swell rather than dissolve.
- Do not boil the finished chowderOnce the thickened milk meets the fish stock, keep it below a simmer. A hard boil curdles the milk and breaks the fish into threads.
- Stock from the frameTwenty minutes is right for fish bones; longer turns the liquor bitter and gluey. Strain it well, as small bones from the head break loose.
- "Juice 2 lemon"The line is garbled, and most likely a fraction has dropped out of it. The juice of half a lemon suits this quantity of vegetables; two whole lemons would overwhelm the cream.
- Cocoanut and curry paste"Cocoanut" here means dried shredded coconut, unsweetened. Curry paste was a bottled Anglo-Indian product, oilier and sharper than the powder; a spoonful of a mild commercial curry paste stands in, or simply use a little more powder.
- Sieving the puréeA blender does in a minute what "rub through a fine sieve" asked of the arm, but pass it through a sieve afterwards anyway — apple skin and celery strings will not break down.
- YieldThe chowder as reconstructed serves six to eight; the curry purée, built on two quarts of water, serves eight as a first course. Add the cream off the heat and do not let it return to the boil.
The Story of Crisco (by Marion Harris Neil, published by Procter & Gamble in the years after the shortening's 1911 launch) is a cookbook with a commercial purpose: its recipes, sweet and savoury alike, call for Crisco in place of butter, lard or suet. A companion Crisco volume, also credited to Neil, went further, supplying a dated menu for each day of the year in its "Calendar of Dinners" so that a housekeeper never had to decide. These two soups show how wide that net was cast. The fish chowder is the plain coastal New England kind, built on salt pork, potatoes and milk, with hard crackers soaked in milk standing in for the ship's biscuit that earlier chowders were layered with. The purf "fl'Indienne" belongs instead to the Anglo-Indian repertoire that reached American tables by way of British cookery writing f curry powder, coconut, apple and lemon in a thickened soup served with rice, a line of descent generally traced to mulligatawny. Setting the two side by side in a single calendar was the point: the same tin of shortening served the Grand Banks and the Raj.