Home › A Calendar of Dinners › October 12
October 12
Menu: Cream of Carrot Soup; Roast Pig, Apple Sauce; Candied Sweet Potatoes; Creamed Celery; Kumquat Salad; Cheese Croutons; Coffee Cheese Croutons-Cut crusts from thin slices of stale bread and spread lightly with creamed Crisco, then with a layer of cream cheese seasoned with salt and pepper. Cover with a second slice of bread and cut into fingers 1 inch wide, using a sharp knife. Place in a shallow pan and brown in a hot oven.
A small savoury from the Crisco book's dinner calendar, meant to go alongside soup rather than stand alone. Two things decide whether it works: bread dry enough to slice thin without tearing, and an oven hot enough to colour the outside before the filling runs.
- "Hot oven"Period usage for a hot oven generally falls somewhere around 400-450F; the book gives no temperature and no time. Watch them and pull them when coloured, so the bread crisps rather than dries through.
- Creamed CriscoCrisco is vegetable shortening; "creamed" means beaten soft and smooth with a spoon so it spreads on delicate bread without dragging. Softened butter behaves the same way and tastes better, if you are not committed to the original.
- Cream cheese, 1913At this date the term often meant a fresh, loose, unaged curd cheese rather than the firm block sold today. Modern block cream cheese works, but soften it first or it will tear the slices.
- Stale bread is the pointDay-old firm white bread slices thin and holds a spread. Fresh sandwich bread compresses into paste and will not give you clean 1-inch fingers.
- CuttingThe original trims the crusts from the slices before spreading; if you prefer, trim after assembling instead. Either way cut the fingers with a long sharp knife (the recipe specifies a sharp knife) wiped between cuts. Neat edges are what distinguish these from toast.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper only, per the original, but the cheese needs more salt than you expect once it is baked and diluted by bread and fat.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; four slices of bread make two sandwiches, which at 1-inch fingers should give roughly eight to ten pieces. Serve hot, straight from the pan, with a clear soup or puree; they soften as they cool.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's book-length argument for its new hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, launched in 1911 as an alternative to lard and butter, and the recipes were assembled by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The "Calendar of Dinners" section pairs a menu with each date, which is why this fragment sits under a coffee heading and points on toward a peanut purée: those lines are stray menu text from the calendar, while the page itself carries a complete recipe with its own method. Croutons in period usage meant almost any small shape of fried or oven-browned bread served with soup, from plain dice to filled fingers like these, and the cheese version gave the shortening an easy showcase in a place where a cook would otherwise have reached for butter.