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May 5
Menu: Hotch Potch; Baked Ham in Pastry; Mashed Turnips; Potato Balls; Cake; Stuffed Tomato Salad; Caramel Ice Cream; Coffee Hotch Potch-1/½ cup pearl barley, 1 small cabbage, 2 carrots, 1 turnip, 2 onions, parsley and herbs, 4 tablespoons Crisco, salt and pepper to taste, and 3 quarts water. Put barley on fire with cold water. Scrape or grate one of carrots, and put it aside in little water. Chop all rest of vegetables very small, and when water boils put them in with Crisco, salt and pepper. There should be enough vegetables to make it rather thick. Boil for 2 hours, then add scraped carrots, and boil for another 1½ hour. Many other vegetables may be added. Lettuce, green peas, and celery when in season.
A meatless Scots hotch potch adapted to sell shortening. It works, but the timings belong to a coal range with a slow back burner, and the printed quantity for the barley has a typographical error.
- The barley measureThe original reads "1/½ cup pearl barley," plainly a printer's garble; it could stand for either half a cup or 1½ cups. Half a cup is the safer reading for 3 quarts of water, since the larger amount will thicken the pot heavily over three hours of boiling.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional volume, so the 4 tablespoons of shortening are there for the advertiser's sake. Butter, olive oil or a spoonful of bacon fat all do the same job of carrying flavour and giving body; the soup is perfectly good with 2 tablespoons rather than 4.
- Total cooking timeTwo hours, then another hour and a half, is three and a half hours of boiling. Cabbage, turnip and onion will have dissolved entirely by then, which is the point of the dish, but modern practice would simmer rather than boil and would get the same result in about 90 minutes with the barley given a head start.
- The reserved carrotGrating one carrot and holding it back is the one instruction worth following exactly. It goes in for the final stretch to give colour and a sweet, distinct note against the collapsed vegetables; if you add all the carrot at the start the soup turns uniformly beige.
- "Parsley and herbs"Unspecified, as was normal. A bay leaf, a few thyme sprigs and a good handful of parsley stalks tied together suit it; add the chopped parsley leaves at the end, not at the beginning.
- SeasoningSalt at the start with no stock and three and a half hours of reduction is a trap. Season lightly at the outset and correct at the end, when the volume has settled.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus vegetables makes roughly 8 to 10 servings. It thickens considerably on standing and will need thinning with water or stock when reheated.
Hotch potch is a Scottish summer soup, its name generally traced to the Old French hochepot, a pot whose contents are shaken or tossed together; the same root gives English "hodgepodge." In its traditional form it is built on a neck or scrag of mutton and depends on young vegetables — new carrots, turnips and green peas — arriving together in early summer. Here the meat has gone entirely and shortening stands in for the fat that mutton would have given up, an arrangement that suited both the household economist and the publisher: Procter & Gamble promoted their new hydrogenated cottonseed oil as a replacement for lard, butter and suet in every corner of the kitchen. The calendar format, assigning a menu to each day of the year, was a common device in period cookbooks for households where the daily question of what to serve was more taxing than the cooking itself.