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October 18
Menu: Rice Soup; Fish Pudding; Cauliflower; Savory Potatoes; Cheese Custard; Apple Dumplings; Coffee Savory Potatoes-Pare 10 large potatoes and slice them, add 1 chopped onion. Crisco pudding dish, put in potatoes and onion, sprinkle with salt and pepper, 1 teaspoon sage and dot with Crisco, add 1 cup water and bake for 1/4 hours.
This is a starred side dish lifted out of a day's menu in the Calendar of Dinners, so it arrives with no oven temperature, no yield and at least one garbled number. The gaps are easy to fill.
- "Bake for 1/4 hours"Most likely a typesetting loss of a leading numeral: sliced raw potatoes in one cup of water need something like 1 1/4 hours, and fifteen minutes would leave them raw. What the original printing actually read cannot be confirmed from this page.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A covered dish of scalloped potatoes wants a moderate oven, 350F, for that hour and a quarter; test with a knife tip at the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- "Crisco pudding dish"Crisco is being used as a verb here, as elsewhere in this book — grease the dish with it. A pudding dish is a deep earthenware baking dish; ten sliced potatoes will need a large one.
- Dotting with CriscoCrisco was and is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, flavour-neutral by design. It behaves like the lard it was sold to replace; butter dotted over the top will brown better and taste of more, at the cost of the book's whole argument.
- Cover itThe recipe says nothing about a lid, but one cup of water for ten potatoes only works if the steam stays in. Cover for the first hour, uncover for the last fifteen minutes to colour the top.
- SageA full teaspoon of dried sage over ten potatoes is assertive. Rub it between your palms as you scatter it.
- YieldTen large potatoes feeds eight to ten as a side. Halved, it fits a standard 9-inch square dish.
- SlicingCut thin and even, about 1/8 inch, and layer with the onion rather than tossing everything in loose. Uneven slices in a shallow liquid give you scorched edges and hard centres.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to explain a product nobody had asked for: a solid white fat made from cottonseed oil by hydrogenation, launched in 1911 as a substitute for lard and butter. The book's Calendar of Dinners gave a full year of menus with the Crisco dishes starred, so a cook could see the fat working across an entire household routine rather than in a single showpiece cake. Savory potatoes of this kind, sliced raw and baked in a little water with onion and a dried herb, belong to a much older tradition of scalloped and boulangere-style potatoes; the only thing new about this version is what is dotted over the top. Cottonseed oil was already familiar to P&G, a soap company, which had plenty of it on hand.