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Nut and Macaroni Savory
4 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco ½ lb. chopped Brazil nuts 1 cupful boiled macaroni 1¾ cupfuls breadcrumbs 2 eggs 3 cupfuls milk 2 tablespoonfuls chopped parsley Salt, pepper, and powdered mace to taste Brown sauce Cut macaroni into small pieces and put into bowl, add nuts, breadcrumbs, seasonings, eggs well beaten, and milk; turn into well greased earthenware dish, dot with tiny pieces of Crisco and bake in moderate oven forty-five minutes. Serve hot with brown sauce.
A meatless baked pudding of the sort that filled the vegetarian chapter of pre-war cookbooks: nuts standing in for meat, bound with a bread-and-egg custard. It works, but the proportions need a second look before it goes in the oven.
- The binding is looseTwo eggs to three cupfuls of milk is a thin custard for this much crumb and nut. Soft fresh breadcrumbs, which such recipes often assumed, will absorb it; dry crumbs will not, and the dish may weep. If in doubt, let the mixture stand fifteen minutes before baking so the crumbs swell, and add a third egg.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F, though the book gives no temperatures. Forty-five minutes suits a shallow dish about two inches deep; a deeper one will need longer. It is done when the centre is just set and a knife comes out clean.
- CriscoHydrogenated all-vegetable shortening, the product this book exists to sell. Any neutral solid shortening works, or melted butter, which improves the flavour considerably here.
- Brazil nutsHalf a pound shelled is roughly a scant two cupfuls chopped. They are high in oil and go rancid quickly, so taste one before committing the batch. Chop them to the size of peas rather than grinding them.
- Boiled macaroniA cupful of cooked macaroni, not dry. Cook it a minute short of done since it will continue to soften in the custard.
- Earthenware dishA 2-quart baking dish; the mixture comes to roughly that. A modern ceramic or glass dish behaves much the same way; metal will brown the edges before the centre sets.
- MaceThe outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. A quarter teaspoon is plenty for this quantity; more turns the dish perfumed.
- Brown sauceNo recipe for it is given here. A simple roux-based gravy of browned flour, fat and stock is what is meant, seasoned and strained.
- YieldAbout six servings as a main course.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no precedent in their kitchens: a shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil, solid at room temperature, neither butter nor lard. The vegetarian chapter served a double purpose. It appealed to a readership often associated with the era's vegetarian food reform movements, and it made the point the company most wanted made, that Crisco came from a plant rather than an animal. Nut loaves and nut savories were the standard vegetarian main dish of the period, built on the idea that nuts substituted for meat because both were rich in fat and protein; Brazil nuts turn up often in these formulas. In English dining a savoury was a small hot dish served at the end of the meal, after the sweet, a distinction the English-inflected cookbook language of the day still took seriously.