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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 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.
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.