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October 3
Menu: Cream of Lettuce Soup; Vegetable Souffle; Stuffed Egg Salad; Apple Tapioca; Coffee Vegetable Souffle-Blend 3 tablespoons Crisco with 2 tablespoons flour, add 1 cup milk, stir till boiling, add 1/2 cup grated cheese, yolks of 2 eggs, 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, seasoning of salt, pepper, and red pepper, and cook till it thickens. Remove from fire and fold in stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Put some pieces of boiled cauliflower into Criscoed mold, then slices of seasontoast. Apple Charlotte-Cut bread into slices 14 inch thick; then into strips 1½ inches wide, and as long as the height of mold to be used; cut 1 piece to fit top of mold, then divide it into 5 or 6 pieces. Crisco mold; Baked Potatoes Boiled Green Peppers dip slices of bread in melted Crisco, and arrange them on bottom and around sides of mold, fitting closely together or overlapping. Fill center entirely full with apple sauce made of tart apples stewed until tender, seasoned with Crisco and sugar. A little apricot jam can be put in center. if desired; chopped almonds also may be added. Cover top with bread, and bake in hot oven 30 minutes. The bread should be an amber color like Turn it carefully on to flat dish. Serve with any sauce that you like. Vegetarian
Two dishes run together here: a cheese-and-vegetable souffl e base and an apple charlotte. The charlotte is the one that survives complete enough to cook from, and it rewards attention to a single point uright, so read it carefully.
- The hinge: bread that is fat-soaked, not merely butteredEvery strip must be dipped in melted fat on both sides and set with no gaps, or the applesauce leaks and the walls collapse when you turn it out. Overlap the strips rather than butting them edge to edge.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco in 1913 was a firm hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, flavourless and solid at room temperature. Modern all-vegetable shortening behaves the same; melted butter gives a better charlotte, though it browns faster.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no figure; in period usage this means roughly 400-425F. Thirty minutes at that heat is what drives the moisture out of the fat-soaked bread and sets the crust; a lower oven leaves the walls soggy and the charlotte will slump.
- Bread thicknessThe thickness in this printing has lost its fraction ('14 inch' for 1/4 inch); the width, 1½ inches, is printed intact, as is the instruction to cut the strips as tall as the mold. A firm day-old white loaf with the crusts off works best.
- The applesauce must be thickStew tart apples until they collapse, then cook them down uncovered until a spoon drawn through leaves a track. Loose sauce steams the bread from the inside. Fill the mold entirely full, as directed, because the filling settles.
- Mold and unmoldingThe recipe names no size; a plain straight-sided tin or a charlotte mold will do. Letting it settle briefly out of the oven before inverting helps, as the printed direction to 'turn it carefully on to flat dish' implies.
- The souffl e baseThe souffle base -- The roux, milk, cheese and yolks make a thick sauce base; fold the whites in while it is warm but not hot. As printed the baking direction for it has dropped out, and no temperature is given anywhere; treat it as a standard souffle mixture and bake in a moderate oven until set.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a mold of this kind will serve a small table. Serve it warm with a custard sauce, cream, or the apricot jam thinned with a little water.
The apple charlotte is generally traced to late eighteenth-century England, and the name is often said to honour Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. It belongs to the long family of thrift puddings built on stale bread, and it survived into twentieth-century American cookbooks because it uses a whole loaf's worth of ends and a glut of windfall apples. Its appearance here is promotional as much as culinary: The Story of Crisco was issued by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks that their new hydrogenated shortening could stand in for butter and lard in every department of the meal, so the fat is named four times in a recipe that would once simply have said "butter." A separate Procter & Gamble volume, A Calendar of Dinners, likewise by Marion Harris Neil, offered a menu and recipes for every day of the year, showing the product carrying an entire day's menu, from the vegetable course to the sweet.