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November 14
Menu: Cream of Tomato Soup; Nut Roast, Piquante Sauce; Sweet Potatoes Fried Egg Plant; Lettuce Salad; Baked Quinces Gingerbread; Coffee; Soak Nut Roast-1/2 cup lentils, ½ cup shelled roasted peanuts, 1/2 tablespoon Crisco, 1/2 cup toasted breadcrumbs, 1/2 teaspoon salt, ½ saltspoon pepper and milk. Soak lentils over night; in morning drain, cover with fresh water and bring to boil. Drain again; and put in fresh water and cook until tender. Drain once more; throw away water and press lentils through colander. Add nuts, either ground or chopped, Crisco, breadcrumbs, seasoning and milk sufficient to make mixture consistency of mush. Put into Criscoed baking dish; bake moderate oven 1 hour; turn out on heated platter; garnish with parsley or watercress and serve with Piquante sauce.
A small vegetarian loaf from the Crisco book's day-by-day dinner calendar. It scales up cleanly, and the only real decision is how much milk goes in.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the pepper here is a scant pinch. The whole recipe seasons about two to three servings.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven of this period is generally read as about 350-375F. An hour at that heat suits a dense loaf of this size in a small dish; check that the centre is set and the top has taken colour.
- The triple soak and drainSoaking overnight, boiling, draining, and boiling again in fresh water was common advice of the period for making pulses digestible. It also carries off some of the lentil flavour. One overnight soak and a single cook in fresh water until tender, roughly 20 to 30 minutes for brown or green lentils, gives a better-tasting loaf; discard the soaking water if you want the traditional effect.
- Milk, unmeasuredThe original leaves the quantity to judgement. Start with a quarter cup and add by the spoonful until the mixture holds together like thick mush and drops reluctantly from a spoon. Too loose and it will not turn out of the dish.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, the product this book exists to sell. Any neutral solid fat or an equal amount of butter or oil works; a half tablespoon in the mix is for richness, not structure.
- Pressing through a colanderThis is a purée step, done before food mills and processors were common in home kitchens. A potato masher or a few pulses in a food processor does the same thing; leave some texture rather than reducing it to paste.
- Turning outGrease the dish generously and line the base with a round of parchment if you want a clean release. Let the loaf rest five minutes before inverting or it will crack.
- Piquante sauceIn books of this period, a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar and shallots, often with capers or chopped pickle. Any tart brown or tomato sauce serves the same purpose, which is to cut the density of the loaf.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a new product: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a white, shelf-stable solid. Its calendar of dinners assigned a menu to every day of the year, and this nut roast falls on November 15. Meatless loaves built on lentils, breadcrumbs and nuts were already familiar from vegetarian and health-reform cookery of the late nineteenth century, much of it connected to Seventh-day Adventist and sanitarium kitchens, and Crisco had an obvious interest in them: the shortening was marketed as a vegetable fat, free of lard, and therefore acceptable at tables where animal fat was avoided for reasons of health or religion. The elaborate draining, boiling and re-boiling of the lentils is consistent with a period concern that pulses were hard to digest.