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November 17
Menu: Stewed Rabbit; Glace Potatoes; 2 tablespoons flour and brown flour;; now add gradually 2 cups water and; stir till smooth, when boiling add salt,; pepper, and paprika to taste, and 2; tablespoons chopped parsley; simmer; slowly 12 hours. Dish and strain; over gravy.
What survives here is the tail end of a browned-flour gravy, printed under a heading that belongs to the dish it accompanied. Read it as a technique note rather than a complete recipe.
- The text is a fragmentThe opening is missing: the fat and the pan are gone, and only "2 tablespoons flour and brown flour" remains. In the book's idiom the lost step would have had Crisco melted in a saucepan, into which the flour is stirred and cooked until it colours; the amount of fat is not recoverable from what survives.
- Simmer slowly 1½ hoursThe printed page gives 1½ hours, which is what our text now reads. That is a long simmer for a flour-and-water gravy, so keep the heat very low and covered, and add water as it reduces to stop it thickening to paste.
- Browning the flour is the whole pointThe colour and the nutty flavour come from cooking the flour in fat until it turns the shade of a hazelnut shell, stirring constantly. Browned flour thickens noticeably less than raw flour, which is why two tablespoons to two cups of liquid gives a thin, pouring gravy rather than a sauce.
- Add the water graduallyThe instruction to add the two cups "gradually" and stir till smooth is the difference between a smooth gravy and a lumpy one. The recipe does not say whether the water should be hot or cold.
- Season at the endSeason once it boils -- salt, pepper and paprika go in when the gravy reaches the boil rather than at the start. The book does not say which paprika is meant.
- "Dish and strain over"Plate the potatoes, then pour the gravy through a strainer over them. Straining removes the parsley and any lumps, so if you want the parsley visible, hold some back and scatter it after straining.
- YieldTwo cups of liquid makes gravy for four to six servings.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to introduce cooks to hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product that had no place in anyone's kitchen memory and therefore needed a whole cookbook to explain it. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a full menu for every day of the year, which is why this page carries a date rather than a chapter number; the fragment above is the gravy from the November 18 dinner, printed tight against the dish it dressed. Browned-flour gravy of this kind was standard American household cookery long before Crisco existed, usually made with pan drippings or butter, and the book's quiet argument throughout is that the new white shortening does the same work more cheaply and keeps longer in a warm pantry. Its survival here in mangled form is a reminder that these promotional cookbooks were set in dense type on cheap paper and proofread accordingly.