Home › A Calendar of Dinners › November 9
November 9
Menu: Broiled Steak; Mashed Potatoes; Spinach with Butter Sauce; Escarole Salad; Cheese Fondue; Coffee Cheese Fondue-2 tablespoons flour, 1/2 cup grated cheese, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 2 eggs, salt, pepper and red pepper, and 1/2 cup milk. Melt Crisco, add flour, then milk gradually. Stir till they boil, cool a little, add cheese and yolks and seasonings. Fold in whites stiffly beaten. Pour into a Criscoed souffle tin. Bake 20 minutes in hot oven. Fold a napkin round and serve hot.
Despite the name, this is a small baked cheese souffle, not a pot of melted cheese for dipping. It is built on a thick white sauce, so the technique matters more than the quantities.
- Scale and yieldHalf a cup of milk and two eggs makes a modest dish serving two, or three at a stretch as a savoury course. It was intended as one item in a larger dinner, not a main.
- Hot ovenRead "hot oven" as 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat is right for a small souffle in a one-quart dish; it should be puffed and set at the edges with a faint wobble at the centre.
- Crisco and the alternativeCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and still usable here, though it contributes no flavour. An equal quantity of butter makes a better roux for a cheese dish.
- "Criscoed souffle tin"A straight-sided dish of about one quart, greased thoroughly. Running the greased finger up the sides in vertical strokes helps the mixture climb.
- Red pepperThis means cayenne, and a pinch is enough. Period cheese dishes often carried it; without some heat and adequate salt the mixture tastes flat.
- The cheeseHalf a cup grated is roughly 2 oz. A firm aged Cheddar melts smoothly into the sauce; pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch and can turn the base grainy.
- The hinge: cool before the yolks"Cool a little" is not optional. Yolks stirred into a boiling sauce scramble, and the specks never disappear. Let the base drop below scalding, beat in the yolks, then fold the whites in with a light hand and bake at once.
- ServingThe napkin folded round the tin was for insulation and presentation at table. A baked souffle begins collapsing within a few minutes, so it goes straight from oven to diner.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in 1911, and its "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a full menu to every day of the year -- this dish belongs to November 10. The point of such a book was to show that the new fat could stand in for butter and lard anywhere a cook already used them, which is why Crisco appears in a delicate egg dish where butter would have been the obvious choice. The name is the older, broader English sense of fondue: through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Anglo-American cookbooks used it for any baked or stirred cheese-and-egg preparation, a usage generally traced back through Brillat-Savarin's cheese-and-egg fondue rather than the Swiss communal pot, which only became familiar to English-speaking cooks much later.