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November 28
Menu: Steak en Casserole; Sweet Potato Croquettes; Boiled Cauliflower; Pear and Grape Salad Cheese Fritters; Pineapple Souffle; Coffee Pineapple Souffle-Cream 1/2 tablespoons each Crisco and flour, add 1 cup canned grated pineapple and juice. Cook 5 minutes, remove from fire, add little salt, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, and 3 beaten egg yolks. Bake in Criscoed dish 20 minutes. Serve with following sauce: Cook 2 tablespoons creamed Crisco in double boiler, add 2 yolks of eggs, 1 at a time, beat, and add 4 tablespoons sugar, 2 tablespoons orange juice, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, and 1/2 cup whipped cream. hot. Serve
A pineapple custard baked in a dish, served with a warm foamy egg sauce. The text as printed has lost a word or two, so a few quantities need reconstructing before you start.
- The truncated sauce lineThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for 1½ tablespoons each of Crisco and flour, which thickens 1 cup of pineapple and juice into a spoonable base. The stray "hot." at the end is the tail of an instruction to serve the sauce hot.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A shallow egg-thickened pudding of this kind belongs at 350F for the stated 20 minutes; it is set when the centre barely trembles.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, but unsalted butter gives a better result in both the base and the sauce. "Creamed Crisco" means beaten alone until soft and smooth before the yolks go in.
- Not a true souffleOnly yolks are used, so nothing rises. Despite the name this is a soft baked custard; do not expect it to dome, and do not beat in the whites hoping it will.
- Canned pineapple, deliberatelyCanned pineapple -- The recipe specifies canned. Raw pineapple contains bromelain, a protease best known for stopping gelatin setting, which can also loosen egg- and dairy-thickened mixtures; canning heat deactivates it, as would sufficient cooking of the base.
- The sauce is the hingeYolks, sugar and juice over water that is hot but never boiling, whisked constantly, thickened only to the point where it coats a spoon. Above roughly 180F the yolks scramble and the acid from the citrus makes it happen faster.
- Whipped cream lastFold the 1/2 cup of whipped cream in off the heat, just before serving. Held over heat it thins and separates, and the sauce loses the foam that is its whole point.
- YieldFour modest servings. The sauce makes about a cup, which is generous for that amount.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written for Procter & Gamble by Marion Harris Neil, a professional cookery writer, to teach American cooks what to do with an entirely new material: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, brought to market in 1911 as a solid white fat that behaved like lard but came from a plant. The book's tactic is visible here, in a section of menus that works Crisco into every course, including desserts where a cook of the period would have reached for butter. The pineapple is the other new industrial ingredient in the recipe: Hawaiian canneries had made grated and sliced pineapple widely available by the 1910s, and canned fruit appears constantly in the dessert menus of these years. The result is a period puzzle in miniature, a dish named a souffle that contains no beaten whites, made with a shortening that had existed for barely two years.