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October 26
Menu: Mock Pigeon, Espagnole Sauce; Scalloped Pumpkin and Rice; Baked Sweet Potatoes; Combination Salad; Honeycomb Pudding; Coffee Scalloped Pumpkin and Rice-In Criscoed fireproof dish arrange layer of stewed pumpkin, cover with layer of boiled rice, then layer of white sauce, proceed until ingredients are used. Cover with crumbs, dot with Crisco and bake until browned on top. To cook pumpkin, cut in two, scrape out the interior, pare and cut into small pieces. Steam and cook till tender. Rub through a sieve, add 2 tablespoons Crisco, season with salt, pepper, and paprika.
A gratin of pumpkin purée layered with rice and béchamel, written in the terse shorthand of a daily menu calendar. The original assumes you know how to make white sauce and what oven to use, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Drain the pumpkinThis is the hinge. Steamed pumpkin holds a great deal of water, and a wet purée will weep into the sauce and leave a soupy dish. After sieving, cook the purée in a dry pan over moderate heat until it stiffens and pulls away from the sides, then season.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. For a gratin of already-cooked ingredients that only needs heating through and browning, 375F for 25 to 30 minutes is right; finish under the broiler if the crumbs are pale.
- "Fireproof dish"Period term for flameproof or ovenproof earthenware and glass — the ancestors of the modern casserole dish. Any 1.5- to 2-quart baking dish works.
- White sauceNone is given. A standard medium white sauce of the period runs 2 tablespoons fat, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked out and seasoned. About 1.5 cups covers three layers in a 2-quart dish. Made with Crisco rather than butter, it wants extra salt.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced in 1911 and still sold, though reformulated to remove trans fats. Butter or oil substitutes directly by volume in both the purée and the sauce, and improves the flavour of the white sauce considerably.
- Which pumpkinA field or jack-o'-lantern pumpkin is stringy and bland. Use a sugar or pie pumpkin, or butternut squash, which behaves much the same here and is easier to pare.
- Rice"Boiled rice" here means plain long-grain, cooked and drained, cooled enough not to steam the sauce. Roughly 1 cup raw, or 3 cups cooked, fills out a 2-quart dish.
- YieldA 2-quart dish serves four to six as a side, three as a meatless supper. It reheats well but the crumb topping softens; refresh it in a hot oven rather than a microwave.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a product nobody had asked for: a solid white shortening made by hydrogenating cottonseed oil, launched in 1911 as a substitute for both lard and butter. The Calendar of Dinners section that closes the book assigns a menu to every day of the year, and October 27 lands squarely in pumpkin season — the squash was cheap and abundant, and most often associated with pie. Steering it into a savoury gratin, layered like a scalloped potato dish, is characteristic of the era's domestic-science writing, which prized economy, vegetables stretched with starch, and the white sauce as a universal binder. The recipe also does the book's real work quietly: Crisco appears three times in a few lines, greasing the dish, enriching the purée, and dotting the crumbs, in a dish where butter or drippings would once have done all three.