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September 28
Menu: Pea Soup; Boiled Tripe, Cream Sauce; Stewed Celery Mashed Potatoes; Beet Salad; Meringues with Sliced Peaches; Almond Fingers; Coffee Almond Fingers-2 cups flour, 1/2 cup Crisco, 1 egg, 2 tablespoons sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon baking powder. Rub Crisco into flour, add sugar and baking powder. Make into stiff paste with egg. Roll out and cut into fingers. Chop 1 cup almonds and mix with 1/2 cup sifted sugar, and white of 1 egg. Spread on fingers and bake quickly a light brown color. Raw Oysters Steamed Fish, Lemon Sauce Stuffed Tomatoes Potatoes Radish and Lettuce Salad Hot Cheese Sandwiches Vanilla Cream Puffs Coffee Hot Cheese Sandwiches-Melt 14 pound cheese with 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1½ teaspoon salt, few grains red pepper, and 1 teaspoon mustard; moisten with a little vinegar and spread between thin slices of white bread. Cut into neat rounds.
A short almond-topped shortbread finger from the Crisco book's dinner calendar, meant to be handed round with coffee. The recipe assumes a cook who knows pastry, so the proportions are given without much guidance.
- The hinge: watch the topping, not the doughThe almond-and-egg-white layer browns well before the pastry base is done, and it scorches quickly. Bake at 400F and start checking at 10 minutes; pull them when the topping is pale gold, not brown, and let the residual heat finish the base.
- "Bake quickly"Period oven tables are inconsistent, but a quick oven is usually put somewhere around 400-450F. With a sugar-and-egg-white topping that is on the hot side; 400-425F is the practical range, and 400F is safer for an even bake.
- Crisco then and nowThe 1913 product was hydrogenated (partially hydrogenated) cottonseed oil, firmer and blander than today's. Current Crisco is a reformulated blend with the trans fat much reduced. It still works here, but chill it before rubbing it in, since the modern version softens faster.
- Rub in, cold"Rub Crisco into flour" means the pastry method: work the fat into the flour with fingertips or a pastry blender until it looks like coarse meal. Do not cream it with the sugar, which would give a soft cookie rather than a crisp finger.
- One egg is the only liquidHalf a cup of shortening to two cups of flour is a dry mix, and a single egg may not bring it together. Add cold water a teaspoon at a time until it just coheres; a stiff paste is correct, a crumbly one is not.
- "Sifted sugar" is ambiguousIn British-influenced writing of the period this usually means fine granulated caster sugar, but it can also mean sifted confectioners' sugar. Caster gives a crisper crust; confectioners' gives a smoother, more macaroon-like top. Either is defensible.
- The almondsUse blanched almonds and chop them fairly fine so the topping spreads evenly over the cut fingers. One egg white to a cup of nuts and half a cup of sugar makes a thick paste, not a pourable glaze; spread it with a knife.
- Shape and yieldRoll the dough about a quarter-inch thick and cut strips roughly 1 by 3 inches. Expect around two to two and a half dozen fingers. They keep in a tin.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, two years after the company introduced hydrogenated cottonseed oil as a substitute for lard and butter. The book's job was to prove the new fat could do everything the old ones did, which is why it runs to hundreds of recipes and a full year's "Calendar of Dinners" — a menu for every day, with the shortening quietly present in each. This finger belongs to the coffee course at the end of one such dinner: a plain rubbed-in pastry with an almond-and-egg-white topping, a form long familiar in British and German baking, where similar strips appear under names like almond slices or Mandelschnitten. The choice is deliberate. Shortbread and almond pastry were exactly the sorts of things cooks believed required butter, and demonstrating them in shortening was the point of the exercise.
A quick savoury from the Crisco calendar section, meant as an accompaniment to coffee at the close of a meal or for an informal supper. The mixture is a soft cheese paste rather than a grilled sandwich.
- Cheese quantityThe figure printed as "14 pound" is almost certainly a quarter pound, 4 oz, with the fraction lost in setting. That is a reasonable proportion for the 3 tablespoons of fat.
- What Crisco is doingCrisco here is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, used as a neutral substitute for butter. Butter at the same weight will work in its place; the recipe appears in this book to show what the shortening can do.
- Cheese to chooseA firm aged cheddar or a dry Cheshire melts to a paste without becoming stringy. Fresh mozzarella and other high-moisture cheeses will weep and soak the bread.
- Melting methodUse low heat and stir constantly, or set the pan over barely simmering water. Held too hot, somewhere around 150-160F upwards, cheese tends to break and turn grainy with the fat separating out.
- The vinegarA teaspoon or two of cider or white wine vinegar is enough. Its acid helps the melted cheese stay smooth as well as sharpening the flavour; add it off the heat, a little at a time, until the paste just spreads.
- Mustard and pepper"Mustard" in an American book of this period most often means dry mustard powder, though prepared mustard cannot be ruled out. "Few grains red pepper" is a pinch of cayenne.
- Assembly and servingSpread while warm and cut the rounds with a plain cutter once the sandwich is made, so the edges stay sealed. These are described as hot, so serve within a few minutes; the paste stiffens as it cools.
Procter & Gamble published cookbooks from 1913 onward to teach cooks what to do with a new product: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a white, shelf-stable solid fat that behaved like lard but carried no animal origin and no rancid smell. A "Calendar of Dinners" section, of a kind that appeared across P&G's Crisco publications, assigned a menu to each day of the year, and the small savoury courses that closed those menus suited the new fat, since a bland shortening let a strong cheese speak for itself. Hot cheese spreads of this kind sit in the same family as Welsh rabbit and the English savoury course, which appears on American tables from the later nineteenth century as an alternative to a sweet dessert; the calendar's placement of this item beside coffee probably reflects that convention rather than any American invention.