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October 23
Menu: Haricot of Veal; Baked Tomatoes Russian Fish Salad; Date Souffle; Coffee Haricot of Veal-Cut 2 pounds fillet of veal into small pieces of uniform shape and size, and fry till a light brown in hot Crisco. Add 2 tablespoons flour blended with 2 tablespoons melted Crisco. Season with salt and pepper, cover with 1 pint stock or water, and let simmer, covered closely, till veal is done and till stock is well cooked away. Take up, arrange in circle on dish, and in center put Lima beans, boiled and reheated in plenty of Crisco.
A plain braise from Procter & Gamble's 1913 Crisco promotional cookbook, where every dish is routed through the new shortening. It works as written; a few terms need translating.
- Crisco, and what to use insteadCrisco here is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, used as an all-purpose frying and finishing fat because the book was selling it. Butter, lard or a neutral oil browns veal better; use about 2 tablespoons for the frying and 2 for the roux.
- "Fillet of veal"Not tenderloin. In period butchery the fillet is the round, cut from the leg. Ask for veal leg or shoulder in 1 to 1.5-inch cubes; shoulder has more connective tissue and gives a better sauce.
- The hinge: brown properly, in batchesThe colour on the meat and the fond it leaves are the only sources of flavour in this dish beyond salt and pepper. Crowding the pan steams the veal grey and the finished braise tastes of nothing.
- The blended flour and fatTwo tablespoons each of flour and melted fat is a roux, added after browning rather than cooked separately. Stir it into the pan and let it cook a minute before the liquid goes in, or the sauce will taste raw and pasty.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups of stock. That is enough to just cover 2 lb of cubed veal in a snug pan; use a heavy pot with a tight lid rather than a wide skillet.
- Time and temperatureThe original gives none. Expect 1 to 1.5 hours at a bare simmer, or covered in a 325F oven, until a fork slides in with no resistance. "Till the stock is well cooked away" means reduced to a clinging sauce, not dry; uncover for the last stretch if it is still loose.
- The Lima beansFresh or frozen baby limas need 15 to 20 minutes; dried large limas need soaking and around an hour. "Reheated in plenty of Crisco" is simply beans tossed in fat -- butter, or a spoonful of the braising liquid, does the same job with more flavour.
- YieldTwo pounds of boneless veal with beans serves four generously, five at a stretch. It reheats well and the sauce improves overnight.
"Haricot" in an English cookbook of this vintage rarely means a bean dish, despite the beans in the middle of the platter here. The name is generally traced to the Old French hericot or the verb harigoter, to cut up, and it attached itself to braises of cut-up mutton or veal long before haricot settled into modern French as the word for a bean; English cookbooks went on using variant spellings such as "harrico" well into the nineteenth century. The dish appears here as part of The Story of Crisco's "Calendar of Dinners," a year of menus published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to demonstrate that their new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could stand in for lard and butter at every stage of a meal -- frying, thickening, and dressing the vegetables. The relentless repetition of the brand name in an otherwise conventional recipe is the point of the book.