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October 8
Menu: Fried Chicken, Swiss Style; Sweet Corn Croquettes; Broiled Tomatoes; Crab Salad; Crackers; Cheese; Coffee Fried Chicken, Swiss Style-Cook chicken in salted water till it is fairly tender. Take up, let get et cool, and cut into neat pieces for frying. Sprinkle these pieces with salt, pepper, and onion juice, then moisten them well with melted Crisco. Let them stand 1 or 2 hours to absorb flavoring of dressing, then dip in batter and drop into hot Crisco to cook till brown. This batter make of 1 cup flour, as much milk as is needed to have it stiff, 2 eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately, and 1/2 cup brandy. This batter will be better for standing, after it is mixed, for 1 hour.
A two-stage chicken: poached, dressed, rested, then battered and deep-fried. The original assumes a cook who knows what "hot Crisco" means and how a fritter batter should hang off a spoon.
- The hinge: don't overcook the poachThe chicken is cooked twice, so bring it only to "fairly tender." Note that the original poaches the bird whole and cuts it up after cooling, so the simmer will take longer than for pieces; stop while there is still some resistance, since anything further and the frying stage dries it out.
- CriscoStill sold and essentially unchanged in purpose: a solid hydrogenated vegetable shortening, though today's version is reformulated to remove trans fats. Any neutral frying fat behaves the same here.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe simply says "hot Crisco" and gives no number. Bring the fat to 350-365F; below that the batter soaks, above it the batter colours before the interior heats through.
- Resting the chicken in fatTwo hours at room temperature is longer than cooked poultry should sit out. Refrigerate it during the standing time and let it come back toward room temperature for twenty minutes before battering.
- "As much milk as is needed"Start with about 1/2 cup and add by the spoonful. With the half cup of brandy already in it, the batter needs less liquid than you would expect — aim for something that coats a piece of chicken without running off.
- The brandyIt lightens the batter, and some of the alcohol cooks off in the fat. Resting the batter an hour lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, which is worth doing; the original rests the fully mixed batter, whites and all, though you may prefer to hold the beaten whites back and fold them in at the end of the rest so they keep more of their lift.
- Onion juiceA standard early-century seasoning: grate an onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or use the liquid from a squeezed grating. A tablespoon or two is plenty for a bird.
- YieldOne chicken, cut up, serves four. Fry in batches so the fat temperature does not drop, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco two years earlier as an all-vegetable substitute for lard and butter — a product that needed a cookbook to explain what a housewife was supposed to do with it. The "Calendar of Dinners" section, from which this October 9 entry comes, gave a full year of menus. "Swiss style" here is loose culinary shorthand rather than a documented regional dish: what marks it as continental to an American reader of 1913 is the poach-then-batter method and the brandy, both closer to a fritter tradition than to flour-dredged Southern fried chicken. The header "Coffee" belongs to the running page furniture of the original volume, not to the recipe.