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September 15
Menu: Impanada; Pea Soup; Celery Mayonnaise; Apple Trifle; Coffee Impanada-Cut up raw chicken, and flour each piece well. Line deep dish with slices raw sweet potato, slices raw white potato, some of chicken, little onion, few slices of bacon, salt and pepper to taste, and 1 can of tomatoes chopped fine, 2 tablespoons Crisco, and 1 tablespoon vinegar. Cover top of dish with sweet and white potatoes. Bake very slowly from 2 to 3 hours. Serve hot. This takes 3 mediumsized sweet potatoes and 6 mediumsized white potatoes.
A layered chicken-and-potato bake, notable for using potato slices where a pie would use pastry. The long slow bake is the whole method: it is what gets raw chicken and two kinds of raw potato done at the same time.
- "Very slowly" means 275-300F"Very slowly" -- The book gives no temperatures, so this is an inference: a low oven, somewhere in the region of 275-325F. Two to three hours at a low temperature is what the recipe expects, and rushing it at 350F risks browning the top potatoes long before the chicken and sweet potato are tender.
- Cover the dishThe original says nothing about a lid, but a deep dish holding raw chicken and potatoes for three hours will dry out uncovered. Cover for most of the bake and uncover for the last half hour if you want colour on the top layer.
- A can of tomatoesCan sizes were not yet standardised in 1913, but canned tomatoes were commonly sold in a No. 2 can, roughly 2 1/2 cups or about 20 oz. A modern 28 oz can is a little generous; a 14.5 oz can is likely too little liquid for three hours of baking.
- CriscoStraight vegetable shortening, and the reason this recipe exists at all. Two tablespoons dotted through the layers is a small amount of fat for the quantity of food; any neutral solid fat behaves the same way here.
- Slice the potatoes thinNeither the sweet nor the white potatoes get a thickness. Keep both around 1/4 inch so they cook through in the same time as the chicken, and keep the top layer overlapping so it forms a lid rather than curling.
- Cut up raw chickenA jointed bird was assumed. Bone-in thighs and drumsticks suit this long bake better than breast, which will be dry well before the three hours are up. Check that the thickest meat reaches 165F.
- VinegarOne tablespoon against a whole can of tomatoes is for brightness, not for pickling. Plain cider or white vinegar; do not substitute anything sweetened.
- YieldThree sweet potatoes, six white potatoes and a cut-up chicken feed four to six as a one-dish supper.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil to promote Procter & Gamble's new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, launched in 1911, and its "Calendar of Dinners" gave menus through the year, Crisco figuring in many of them. The name here appears to be a variant spelling of empanada, from Spanish empanar, to enclose in bread or pastry -- normally a filled turnover, though this version drops pastry entirely and builds a crust from overlapping potato slices. Baked pie-form empanadas are known in the Spanish-speaking world and the Philippines, and the recipe's tomatoes, bacon and sweet potato point loosely in that direction, though the book gives no source.