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November 3
Menu: Celery Soup; Casserole of Lamb; Sweet Pickle; Creamed Onions; Mashed Potatoes; Cabbage Salad; Caramel Ice Cream; Coffee Casserole of Lamb-21/2 pounds loin of lamb, 1/2 cup rice, 2 cups good gravy, 1 blade mace, 1/2 cup Crisco, 2 egg yolks, salt and pepper, and a little grated nutmeg. Half roast loin of lamb, and cut it into steaks. Boil rice in boiling salted water for 10 minutes, drain it, and add to it gravy with nutmeg and mace; cook slowly until rice begins to thicken, remove it from fire, stir in Crisco, and when melted add yolks of eggs well beaten; Crisco a casserole well, sprinkle steaks with salt and pepper, dip them in melted Crisco, and lay them in Criscoed dish; pour over gravy that comes from them, add rice and simmer for 1½ an hour.
A 1913 Crisco-era braise of half-roasted lamb loin finished under a blanket of enriched rice. The method is sound, but two things in it — the vessel and the final timing — need translating before it works on a modern stove.
- "Casserole" means the potIn this period the word denotes a lidded earthenware or metal cooking dish, not a baked mixture. A heavy Dutch oven or covered braiser is the equivalent. Keep it covered so the rice does not dry out.
- Half roast the loinRoast the 2½ lb loin hot and fast until browned outside but still distinctly underdone within, then cut into steaks. The book gives no temperature or time; something in the region of 400F for 20 to 25 minutes will do. The point is colour and rendered fat, not doneness.
- The hinge: temper the yolksThe rice mixture must be off the heat before the beaten yolks go in, and it must not return to a boil afterwards. Boiled yolks curdle and the rice turns grainy instead of creamy.
- An hour and a half is too longLoin is a lean, tender cut and is likely to come out dry and stringy after 90 minutes. Forty to forty-five minutes of gentle cooking should be enough to finish the meat and swell the rice; the recipe directs a simmer rather than an oven, so no temperature is given. If you want the long cook the recipe describes, use shoulder chops instead.
- Blade maceA whole blade of mace is the dried aril of nutmeg, sold in flat curls. Roughly ¼ teaspoon of ground mace substitutes; fish the blade out before serving if you use the whole spice.
- "Good gravy"Most likely a rich brown sauce built on stock rather than a thin pan gravy. Two cups of well-reduced brown stock, lightly thickened, gives the right body -- the rice absorbs most of it.
- The CriscoHalf a cup of vegetable shortening in total, used for greasing the pot, dipping the steaks, and enriching the rice. Butter or a neutral oil does the same work; the book calls for Crisco because the book exists to sell it.
- YieldServes four generously. It appears here as the centre of a November 4 dinner, so plan a green vegetable alongside rather than a second starch.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it. The solution was to reprint a broad repertoire of respectable dishes — many of them, like this one, drawn from Anglo-French domestic cookery — with the word Crisco substituted wherever butter, lard or suet would have stood, sometimes so insistently that it becomes a verb: "Crisco a casserole well." The dish itself is an older idea than the fat: rice bound with egg yolk and stock, enclosing or covering a braised meat, was a familiar form in nineteenth-century French and English cookbooks. The date attached to this recipe places it in a calendar of suggested dinners, a device the Crisco books used and which was expanded into a companion volume of its own; it reflects the period's conviction that the chief burden of housekeeping was not cooking but deciding what to cook.<br/><br/>The odd page title is most likely an artifact of the calendar's layout: the lamb was one course among several, and coffee closed the meal.</br></br>