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November 4
Menu: Tomato Soup; Steamed Cod, Parsley Sauce; Roast Ribs of Beef, Horseradish Sauce; Colcannon; Potatoes; Charlotte Russe; Coffee Steamed Cod-Wipe 4 cod steaks dry, and sprinkle with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and melted Crisco on under side; lay on Criscoed platter, put another Criscoed platter over; set on top of saucepan of boiling water, and steam 3/4 of an hour, or until fish begins to leave bones. Serve with parsley sauce. For parsley sauce. Blend 2 tablespoons Crisco with 2 tablespoons flour in a pan over the fire, add 1 cup milk and stir till boiling, season with salt, pepper and red pepper, and stir and cook for 10 minutes, then add 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, and serve.
A plate-over-plate steamer and a basic white sauce, from a book whose brief was to work Crisco into every course. The timing is the one thing that needs fixing.
- Steam for minutes, not three-quarters of an hourCod steaks 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick are done in 8 to 12 minutes of steaming, when the flesh turns opaque and separates from the bone. Forty-five minutes will leave dry, cottony fish.
- The two-platter methodAn improvised steamer: one plate inverted over another, set on a pan of boiling water so the trapped steam cooks the fish. Any wide saucepan with a steamer basket and a lid does the same job more reliably. Use ovenproof china or metal, not modern decorated stoneware, and mind the escaping steam when lifting the top plate.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, though reformulated in 2007 to cut trans fats. Butter or olive oil is the better choice for both the fish and the sauce here; "Criscoed" simply means greased.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not a fresh chile. A pinch is enough for a cup of sauce.
- Why the sauce cooks 10 minutesThat long a simmer is there to cook out the raw flour taste, which is worth keeping. Add the parsley only at the end, off or nearly off the heat, so it stays green. Whisk the milk in gradually to avoid lumps.
- Seasoning the undersideThe recipe puts the lemon juice and fat on the under side only. Season both sides.
- YieldFour cod steaks and a cup of sauce serve four. The sauce thickens as it stands, so loosen it with a spoonful of milk before serving.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, who had introduced Crisco in 1911 as a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, marketed as a clean, odorless replacement for lard and butter. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" gave a full menu for every day of the year, and its real purpose was to show that the new fat could stand in anywhere a household fat was called for: greasing the platters, enriching the fish, and forming the roux of the sauce. Steamed cod with parsley sauce was itself unremarkable New England and British cookery of the period, cod being cheap, abundant and sold in thick cross-cut steaks; the novelty the reader was meant to notice was the tin of white shortening, not the fish.END晴Not sure why extra characters appeared. Let me re-emit clean JSON.{