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October 13
Menu: Peanut Puree; Roast Pig Reheated in Casserole; Squash; Baked Potatoes; Red Cabbage Salad; Sultana Roll; Coffee Peanut Puree-1 cup peanut butter, 1 quart milk, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 teaspoon onion juice, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 1 bay leaf, 1 blade mace, pepper and salt to taste. Put milk, Crisco, peanut butter, onion juice, pepper, bay leaf and blade mace in double boiler; stir and cook until hot. Moisten cornstarch in little cold milk and add it to hot milk; stir until smooth and thick; strain through sieve. Add salt and serve at once with croutons.
A cream soup of the type that filled the first course of nearly every American dinner menu around 1913. It is straightforward, but the peanut butter of the period was a different product from most jars sold today.
- Peanut butterIn 1913 this meant ground roasted peanuts, unsweetened and unhydrogenated, often unsalted. A natural grind-only peanut butter gives the intended flavour; sweetened commercial styles make the soup cloying and their added sugar can scorch.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, and a tablespoon of any neutral shortening or oil does the same job. Butter is a perfectly good substitute here and adds something the original was deliberately avoiding.
- Blade maceA whole piece of the lacy aril from around the nutmeg, sold dried. If you cannot find blades, a scant quarter teaspoon of ground mace added with the milk works, though it will not strain out.
- Onion juiceGrate a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or crush it in a garlic press. A tablespoon takes roughly half a medium onion.
- The straining is the pointPeanut butter will not fully dissolve in milk, and the bay and mace need removing. Push the soup through a fine sieve with the back of a ladle, not just a rinse-through, or the texture stays gritty.
- Double boilerUsed because a milk-and-peanut mixture catches on direct heat almost immediately. A heavy saucepan over low heat and constant stirring will do, but the double boiler is genuinely the safer route.
- Salt lastCorrect, as written: salted peanut butter varies enormously, so wait until the soup is thickened and strained before judging.
- YieldA quart of milk plus a cup of peanut butter comes to roughly five cups before straining, a little less once the sieve has held back the solids. The recipe gives no yield, but a soup this rich reads as small first-course servings rather than main-course bowls.
This recipe comes from the Crisco cookery books Procter & Gamble commissioned from Marion Harris Neil after introducing the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in 1911, and which needed to teach American cooks what to do with it. The day-by-day menu format here -- the dateline 'October 14' followed by grilled halibut and roast mutton with currant jelly -- belongs to the company's A Calendar of Dinners, which supplied a full menu for every day of the year, rather than to The Story of Crisco (1913). Peanut butter itself was still a relatively new commercial article, having moved from sanitarium and health-food circles into ordinary grocery stores in the first decade of the century, and cookery writers of the period were busy demonstrating that it could do more than fill sandwiches. Sieved cream soups of this kind, thickened with cornstarch or flour and infused with bay and mace, were a standard opening course at a respectable dinner, and almost any ingredient that could be pureed was pressed into one.