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October 4
Menu: Vegetarian; Almond Soup; Nut Loaf, Cranberry Jelly; Lima Beans Carameled Sweet Potatoes; Onion Souffle; Butterscotch Pie; Orange Ice; Coffee Nut Loaf-Mix together 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 cup chopped English walnuts and almonds, 1 cup crumbs, 1/2 teaspoon salt, dash pepper, 1 large ground onion, 3 tablespoons flour, 2 well-beaten eggs and 1 cup milk. Pour into Criscoed pudding dish and bake 30 minutes. Orange Pie-Line pie tin with Crisco pastry. Beat yolks of 3 eggs with 1 cup sugar till light; add 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 2/3 cup milk, grated rind and strained juice of 1 orange. Place in double boiler and stir till it October 5 thickens, then pour on to crust and bake 30 minutes. Cover top with meringue made with whites of eggs and sweetened with 3 tablespoons sugar and flavored with 1 teaspoon Place in oven to orange extract. brown. Vegetarian Baked Chestnuts Galantine of Lentils Escalloped Tomatoes Fruit Salad Apple Charlotte Coffee Vegetarian
Two dishes from a single October menu page: a meatless nut loaf and an orange custard pie. Neither gives an oven temperature, which was normal for 1913 and is the first thing to settle.
- Oven temperaturesNeither bake is given a temperature. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for both. The meringue can go back in at 350F for 12-15 minutes for a firm, evenly tanned top, or under a broiler for a minute or two if you watch it constantly.
- "Criscoed"The book's own verb for greasing with Crisco. Any solid shortening, butter or a spray works; the point is a well-filmed dish so the loaf turns out whole.
- CrumbsMost likely dry bread crumbs, made from stale bread grated or rolled fine, rather than the coarse fresh crumbs or seasoned commercial crumb sold today; the recipe says only "crumbs". A cup of crumbs plus the flour is what binds this loaf, so measure them lightly packed.
- The hinge in the nut loafOne tablespoon of fat to a cup of nuts means the eggs and milk do all the setting. Bake until the centre is just firm to a light press and a knife comes out clean; pushed past that it turns dry and crumbly, and it will not slice cleanly until it has rested 10 minutes.
- "1 large ground onion"Ground through a food mill or meat grinder, skin removed. Finely grated or minced onion is the modern equivalent; a large raw onion is assertive here, so a medium one is safer if the nuts are mild.
- The pie crustRaw pastry under an already-thickened custard will tend to steam rather than crisp. The original bakes shell and filling together; if you prefer, blind bake the shell in a hot oven until set and lightly coloured, then fill with the hot custard and finish with the moderate bake.
- Egg whitesThe meringue uses the three whites left from the yolks. Three tablespoons of sugar to three whites is a lean, old-style soft meringue; it will weep if the filling is cold, so spread it while the custard is still warm and seal it to the crust edge all round.
- Orange extractA teaspoon of extract in a small meringue is heavy-handed by current standards. Half a teaspoon, or a little grated zest, gives the same lift without the medicinal edge.
- YieldNo dish or tin size is given. The nut loaf would suit roughly a 1-quart pudding dish or small loaf pan and serve about four as a main course; the pie filling is modest and fits a small to medium pie tin.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco in 1911 as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Its "Calendar of Dinners" gave a full menu for every day of the year, each one quietly routing the household's frying, pastry and greasing through the new product in place of lard and butter. That the October 5 dinner is built around a nut loaf seems characteristic of the period: nut-and-crumb loaves bound with egg appear often as a meatless main course in American cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s, serving vegetarians, Friday and Lenten tables, and thrifty cooks alike, and they were also a useful argument for a fat that came from cottonseed rather than the hog. The orange pie beside it is a plain boiled custard set on pastry and topped with the leftover whites, the sort of no-waste sequence that seems to have shaped a good many two-part period desserts.