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November 23
Menu: Bisque of Clams; Boiled Fish, Hollandaise Sauce; Potatoes Baked Parsnips; Celery Salad; Italian Fritters; Coffee Italian Fritters-1 egg, 1 cup milk, grated rind 1 lemon, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 5 slices stale cake, ½ teaspoon powdered cinnamon, sugar and few grains salt. Cake should be about a 14 of an inch thick, not less. Cut out into oval or round shapes with cutter. Beat egg, mix with milk, lemon rind, salt, and about 1 teaspoon sugar. Lay slices of cake in this custard until they are soft, but not crumbly; time will depend upon how stale cake is. Heat 1½ Crisco in frying pan, lift few pieces of cake up carefully and lay them in hot Crisco. Brown 1 side, then turn them over and brown other side also. Add some pieces of Crisco as required. Mix cinnamon with 2 teaspoons sugar and sprinkle some of these over each fritter. Serve with hard sauce.
A stale-cake variant on French toast, built to use up the dry end of a pound cake or plain layer cake. Two numbers in the original text are garbled by the printing, and one of them matters.
- The "14 of an inch" is a quarter inchThe typesetter lost the fraction bar. Slices thinner than about ¼ inch collapse in the custard; ⅜ inch is safer if the cake is fresh-ish.
- "1½ Crisco" means tablespoonsThe quantity unit dropped out. Read it as 1½ tablespoons of fat in the pan, adding more as the cake soaks it up — the instruction to "add some pieces of Crisco as required" confirms shallow frying rather than deep.
- Crisco itselfCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a clean-tasting, high-smoke-point alternative to lard and butter. Modern vegetable shortening behaves the same way in the pan; butter will brown and burn faster at the heat this needs, so use shortening, refined oil, or a mix of butter and oil.
- The hinge: soak by feel, not by clockThe recipe deliberately refuses to give a time. Very dry cake may take a minute a side in the custard; a day-old cake takes seconds. Lift a slice on a spatula — if it sags in the middle it has gone too far and will disintegrate in the fat.
- Pan temperatureMedium heat, around 350F if you are measuring. Too hot and the custard-soaked surface browns before the interior warms; too cool and the cake drinks fat.
- Hard sauceNot a cooked sauce — creamed butter beaten with powdered sugar and a spirit or vanilla, chilled firm and served in a lump so it melts over the hot fritter. The book assumes every cook knows it; most modern readers do not.
- YieldFive slices, so one modest serving for two people or a single dessert portion. One egg and a cup of milk is a generous quantity of custard for five slices, so there is likely enough to stretch to more if you want them.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco two years earlier and needed to teach American cooks what to do with a solid vegetable fat that was neither butter nor lard. The book pairs recipes with "A Calendar of Dinners" — a dated menu for every day of the year, this one for November 24 — so a housekeeper could cook her way through the calendar and, incidentally, through a great deal of shortening. The fritter itself is older than the fat: soaking stale cake or bread in sweetened custard and frying it is the same frugal impulse behind French pain perdu and Italian fried pandorato, and English and American cookbooks had long carried such dishes under names like "poor knights." Recipes headed "Italian fritters" also turn up in nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks, though not always for this dish. What the name signals here is less a genuine Italian provenance than the period's habit of attaching a continental label to a dessert made from leftovers.