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September 14
Menu: Oysters * Porterhouse Steak; Scalloped Tomatoes; Lima Beans; Apple and Chestnut Salad; Pear Sponge Coffee Porterhouse Steak-Have large porterhouse steak well trimmed and shaped, and slit with sharp knife an opening flatwise through sirloin and tenderloin. Make forcemeat of 1 dozen olives chopped, 2 pounded anchovies, 1 chopped red pepper, salt and onion juice to taste, and 2 tablens melted Crisco. With this forcemeat fill smoothly cavities made in steak. Pinch steak together firmly at edges and set away on ice for 1 hour or even longer. Broil them over clear fire and serve without sauce. spoons
The page is a menu entry from the Crisco calendar, and the text has come through with a line of type displaced — the "2 tablens ... spoons" is a single instruction for 2 tablespoons of melted Crisco, and "September 15 * Impanada" is the start of the next day's menu. What remains is a workable recipe for a porterhouse stuffed with an olive and anchovy forcemeat.
- The hinge: cut the pocket, not through the steakA porterhouse of broiling thickness, ideally 1 1/2 to 2 inches, is slit flatwise with a thin knife so that both the strip side and the tenderloin side get a pocket, entered from the outer edge. Keep the opening narrow; the filling is held in by the meat, not by trussing, and the "pinch together firmly at edges" only works if the slit is small.
- Why it rests an hour on iceChilling firms the melted Crisco in the forcemeat so it behaves more like a solid paste and is likelier to stay put over the fire. The recipe's own "or even longer" suggests the hour is a minimum. Chill on a rack rather than tightly sealed.
- Pounded anchoviesTwo whole salt-packed anchovies, rinsed, boned and mashed to a paste (about four fillets), or roughly 2 teaspoons of anchovy paste from a tube. The anchovies and olives are both salty, so taste the forcemeat before adding any salt at all.
- "Chopped red pepper"Because the recipe calls for it chopped, this is most likely a fresh sweet red pepper or a canned pimiento rather than cayenne. The recipe asks for one whole pepper; chop it very fine so the filling stays smooth.
- Onion juiceAn old shortcut for onion flavor without wet pulp: grate half a small onion on a fine rasp and use the liquid that collects, roughly a teaspoon. Grated onion pulp works, but adds moisture that loosens the forcemeat.
- Broiling over a "clear fire"Clear means burned down to steady coals with no flame or smoke — a hot charcoal bed or a gas grill preheated with a clean grate. Because the filling is fatty, keep a cooler zone to move the steak to if it flares.
- DonenessThe original gives no time. On a 1 1/2 inch steak, figure roughly 5 to 7 minutes a side over high heat and pull it at 130 to 135F in the center of the tenderloin for medium-rare; the chilled filling will read cooler than the meat, so check the meat itself.
- Yield and servingA whole porterhouse of this size serves two to three. "Serve without sauce" is deliberate — the olives and anchovies are the sauce. Rest it 8 to 10 minutes, then carve across the grain, cutting through the pocket so each slice shows the filling.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a brand-new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold from 1911 as a substitute for both lard and butter. It was the work of Marion Harris Neil, a professional cookery writer hired to demonstrate that the shortening could stand in for animal fat anywhere — including, as here, in a forcemeat where a nineteenth-century cook would automatically have reached for butter. Dated day-by-day menus of this kind, headed "September 15" and so on, belong to Crisco's "A Calendar of Dinners," a separate promotional volume in the same series, rather than to The Story of Crisco itself. The stuffed broiled steak is older than the shortening: pocketed and forcemeat-filled steaks appear through Victorian and Edwardian cookery, and the olive-and-anchovy combination recalls the salty, pungent "savoury butters" and devilled seasonings that were a common English answer to plain grilled meat. Crisco's early marketing also leaned on the fact that the product contained no animal fat, which made it attractive to kosher households and to cooks warned off lard on grounds of digestibility — a claim the book repeats often, and one worth reading as advertising rather than as fact.