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November 13
Menu: Lamb Cutlets; Potatoes *Curried Lima Beans; Tomato Salad; Cheese Fritters; Benedictine Jelly; Coffee Curried Lima Beans-Chop 1 onion finely and fry it for a few minutes in 2 tablespoons Crisco, add 1 tablespoon curry powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon flour, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, and 1 cup water, allow to cook slowly for 20 minutes, then add 1/2 cups cooked lima beans, mix well and serve hot.
A quick curried side dish from the dinner calendar in Procter & Gamble's Crisco booklet. It is essentially a thin curry sauce built in a skillet, with cooked beans folded in at the end.
- The bean quantityThe printed page gives 1½ cups cooked lima beans, as our text now reads. Add them until they are coated by the sauce but not swimming in it.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a neutral all-purpose fat. Two tablespoons of any modern shortening, butter, ghee or vegetable oil does the same job here.
- Bloom the curry powderThis is the hinge. The powder goes into the hot fat with the onion before any liquid, which is what keeps it from tasting raw and dusty. Give it 30 to 60 seconds of stirring, no longer, or it scorches and turns bitter.
- One teaspoon of flourThat is a very light thickening for a cup of water, so expect a loose sauce rather than a gravy. The 20-minute simmer is doing most of the reducing; leave the pan uncovered.
- SaltA full teaspoon assumes unsalted beans cooked from dried. If you are using canned limas, which are already salted, start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust at the end.
- The beansFresh or frozen baby limas need only to be heated through, two or three minutes. Long cooking after they are already tender collapses them into a mealy paste.
- Lemon juiceA teaspoon added at the start of a 20-minute simmer loses much of its fresh brightness, though its acidity stays in the sauce. A little more just before serving sharpens the dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; on the reconstructed bean quantity it would make roughly a side dish for three or four, or two over rice.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco in 1911 as a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening pitched as a modern replacement for lard and butter. Its calendar of dinners assigned menus to days of the year, with each component given as a short paragraph like this one, which is why the dish arrives with no yield and no serving note. The curry powder is worth noticing: commercial curry blends had been sold in American groceries since the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period used them freely on vegetables, eggs and leftover meat as a cheap way to make plain food taste deliberate. Lima beans, meanwhile, were common in American kitchen gardens and were widely available dried and canned, so a cook in November could well have had a jar or a bag of dried ones close at hand.