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November 7
Menu: Corned Beef; Cabbage, a la Creme Potatoes; Olive Salad; Hasty Pudding; Cocoanut Cakes; Coffee Cabbage, a la Creme-Trim and wash 1 cabbage, then boil in boiling salted water, adding 1 peeled onion stuck with 2 cloves. When tender take out onion and drain cabbage. Either chop finely or rub through a sieve. Melt 1 tablespoon Crisco in pan, put in cabbage, stir it well, add 3 tablespoons cream gradually, salt and pepper to taste. When thoroughly hot, pile in hot dish, and garnish with sippets fried bread or toast.
A plain creamed cabbage from Crisco's 1913 promotional calendar of dinners. The only real decisions are how long to boil and whether to purée or chop.
- CriscoStraight hydrogenated shortening, the product the book was written to sell. Any neutral fat works; butter gives a better result here since there is already cream in the dish.
- Cabbage sizeThe recipe simply says "1 cabbage" and gives no weight or yield; a medium green or Savoy head is the obvious reading.
- Boiling timeCut up, a green cabbage is tender in roughly 8-12 minutes; Savoy in less. The recipe gives no time, and long boiling of the period would have produced the sulphurous flavour cabbage is often blamed for. Drain hard and press out water, or the cream will thin to soup.
- The onion and clovesA single peeled onion pierced with two whole cloves, dropped into the cooking water and removed before serving. It is there to perfume the water, not to be eaten.
- Rub through a sieveThe Victorian purée method, done with a wooden spoon and a hair or wire sieve. A food mill or a few pulses in a processor gives the same texture; do not run it long or the cabbage turns gluey.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in fat or toasted, arranged round the edge of the dish. Cut them from a firm white loaf and add them at the last moment so they stay crisp.
- Serving"Pile in hot dish" means heaping the purée into a warmed vegetable dish. Cabbage cools very fast once mashed, so warm the dish first.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was published to teach American cooks what to do with a new all-vegetable shortening, and its recipes are arranged as dated entries, a full menu to a day. The cabbage dish itself is older than the book: creamed and sieved vegetables finished with sippets belong to the Anglo-French domestic repertoire of the nineteenth century, and the clove-studded onion dropped into the pot is a standard trick of that tradition, generally traced to the French oignon clouté used to season stocks and braises. What makes the page a period document is the substitution at its center, a tablespoon of factory shortening standing in for the butter or bacon fat an earlier cook would have reached for without thinking.