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Mixed Vegetable Souffle
1 tablespoonful Crisco ¼ lb. cooked carrots ½ lb. boiled potatoes 3/4 lb. boiled turnips 3 eggs ½ lb. stewed onions 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley Salt and pepper to taste Chop onions, add vegetables mashed, then mix well, add Crisco, seasonings, and yolks of eggs. Beat up whites of eggs to stiff froth and fold them into mixture, then turn it into Criscoed fireproof dish and bake thirty minutes in moderate oven.
A vegetable pudding lightened with beaten egg white — closer to a French pain de légumes than to a cheese souffle. The proportions are generous; scale down before you commit.
- The carrot quantityThe printed page gives ¼ lb. cooked carrots, which is what our text now reads. That is about 4 oz, in proportion with the potatoes, turnips, and onions in the dish.
- Total yieldAs written (with the carrots read as ¼ lb) this comes to about 4 lb of vegetables, enough for perhaps eight to ten as a side or six as a main. Halving everything and using two eggs gives a more manageable dish in a 1½-quart baking dish.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F; period "moderate" covers roughly 325–375F. Thirty minutes sets the egg through a shallow dish; a deep one needs 40–45 minutes, until the centre is firm and no longer wet when a knife is drawn out.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Any solid or liquid neutral fat works — butter is better here for flavour. One tablespoon in this volume of vegetables is a token amount; two or three improves the texture.
- "Criscoed fireproof dish"A greased ovenproof earthenware or glass dish. "Fireproof" in 1913 distinguished bakeware that could go straight into the oven from ordinary table china.
- Get the vegetables dryBoiled potato, turnip and onion all carry water, and a wet purée will not hold the foam. Drain well and let the mash steam off in the hot pan for a minute before mixing, or the souffle weeps.
- FoldingCool the seasoned purée to warm, not hot, before folding in the whites, and fold in two additions. Stiff whites collapse instantly against a hot, heavy mash.
- SeasoningTurnip and potato absorb a great deal of salt. Taste the purée before the whites go in — after that point you cannot stir it again.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was a promotional cookbook for Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced in 1911. Because Crisco contained no animal fat, it was marketed to kosher households, an audience the lard trade could not reach. The dish itself belongs to an older tradition of savoury vegetable souffles and moulded purées that ran through late-Victorian and Edwardian cookery, where beaten egg white was a common means of turning a heavy mash into something presentable at table. Its plainness is period-typical: root vegetables, parsley, salt and pepper, and no cheese or sauce to carry it.