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September 1
Menu: Cauliflower Soup; Roast Beef, Brown Gravy; Oven-Panned Potatoes; Creamed Carrots; Celery and Green Pepper Salad; Coffee Cauliflower Soup-Cut large parboiled cauliflower into thick slices, also 2 large onions and heart of a stalk of celery. Fry these in hot Crisco. When done to a golden color, remove them from pan to drain. Have ready stewpan of chicken and veal stock, ready seasoned as for table, then place in slices of cauliflower, onions, and celery, and allow them to simmer until vegetables can be broken with 2 forks. Add to this 1 glass of Madeira wine. Pull stewpan aside, and stir in 2 beaten yolks of eggs, and enough cream to make whole thickness of rich cream. Let all simmer, but not boil. Send to table with small dice-shaped pieces of toast.
A rich vegetable soup finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, from the Crisco book's day-by-day dinner calendar. The stray line at the end, "September 2 Cavaire on Toast," is the heading of the next day's menu and has nothing to do with this soup.
- The hinge: never let it boil after the yolksOnce the beaten yolks and cream go in, the soup must stay below a simmer — roughly 170-180F. The instruction "let all simmer, but not boil" is contradictory by modern usage; hold it just short of bubbling or the yolks will curdle into threads and no amount of whisking will bring them back.
- Temper the yolksBeat the yolks with the cream, then whisk a ladleful of the hot stock into that mixture before returning it all to the pan off the heat. The original's "pull stewpan aside" is doing this job, but tempering makes it reliable.
- A glass of MadeiraA wineglass in period recipes is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, though the term is loose and some sources allow up to 4; a quarter to half a cup will do. Use a dry or medium-dry Madeira such as Sercial or Verdelho; the sweet Malmsey styles will push the soup toward dessert.
- Quantity of stockNone is given. As a working guide for one head of cauliflower, two onions and a celery heart, 6 to 7 cups of stock, about 1 cup of cream and the two yolks; that would serve roughly six as a first course.
- ParboilingFive to six minutes in salted water is enough — the cauliflower has to hold its shape through frying and then a long simmer. Drain it well and pat dry or it will not brown.
- Crisco and the fryingCrisco was new in 1911 and the book uses it everywhere; butter or any neutral oil browns these vegetables just as well. Medium-high heat, and do not crowd the pan.
- Chicken and veal stockVeal stock adds body from gelatin. If you have none, use chicken stock and accept a lighter soup, or fortify it by simmering a split veal or pork bone in it. "Seasoned as for table" means the stock should already taste finished before the vegetables go in.
- Doneness"Until vegetables can be broken with 2 forks" will take roughly 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer, depending on how far the parboiling took them. The soup is meant to be a chunky one — the pieces stay whole, which is why the cauliflower is cut large.
- The croutonsSmall dice of bread fried in fat or toasted dry, added at the table so they stay crisp.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: a solid vegetable shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911 as a substitute for both butter and lard. The "Calendar of Dinners" that assigned a full menu to every day of the year is associated with P&G's Crisco cookbook series more broadly — it is the substance of the successor volume A Calendar of Dinners — and the style of the cooking is squarely late-Victorian hotel and club food — cream soups, egg-yolk liaisons, a glass of Madeira, caviar on toast the following day. A soup finished with yolks and cream is a classic French velouté treatment, and the technique of frying the vegetables first for color before stewing them is the same one that gives onion soup its depth. That the recipe uses Crisco for that frying rather than butter is the whole editorial point of the book: the recipes were there to demonstrate that the new fat could stand in anywhere.