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September 29
Menu: Pilau of Fowl; Glazed Carrots Potatoes au Gratin; Lettuce and Nasturtium Salad; Vanilla Eclairs; Coffee Pilau of Fowl-Truss fowl for boiling, place in pan with 3 cups stock or water and simmer 30 minutes. Wash and dry 1 cup rice. Melt 2 tablespoons Crisco and fry 1 chopped onion to golden brown in it; remove onion to plate, add 2 extra tablespoons Crisco and fry rice and 1/4 cup blanched almonds till yellow, add onion, 2 tablespoons seeded raisins, with salt and paprika to taste. Tie in piece of muslin 3 cloves, 6 whole white peppers, 1 bay leaf, and 1 inch cinnamon stick and add them. Make hole in center of rice, lay fowl in it, pour in 1 cup of the stock, let simmer until fowl and rice are cooked, adding more stock as rice swells. Turn fowl over during cooking. Serve fowl with rice around it. Conservative Pudding-The weight of 3 eggs in Crisco, sugar, and flour. Beat Crisco and sugar to a cream, add flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, September 30 and mix slowly with eggs. Add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract and mix all well. Ornament a Criscoed mold with raisins, pour in mixture, steam 2 hours and serve hot with milk.
Two dishes from a single dinner page: a spiced chicken pilau and a steamed sponge pudding measured by the weight of its eggs. Both assume a cook who knows how to keep a simmer going for an hour without checking a timer.
- The fowlA "fowl" in this period is a mature laying hen, tougher and far more flavourful than anything sold today. Use a 4-5 lb chicken, whole and trussed, and expect the 30-minute pre-simmer plus roughly 45-60 minutes in the rice; a supermarket bird cooks faster than the hen this was written for, so check the thigh joint rather than the clock. Thigh meat should read 175F.
- Crisco means shorteningThe book exists to sell it, so Crisco appears where an older recipe would say butter, lard or oil. In the pilau, any neutral oil or clarified butter frying the onion, rice and almonds is closer to the dish's origins. In the pudding, use butter or a modern vegetable shortening; the texture depends on creaming a solid fat with sugar.
- Liquid and riceThree cups of stock are made in the first simmer, and only one cup goes in at the start. Total absorption for 1 cup of long-grain rice runs to about 2 cups of liquid, so add the rest in stages as directed and stop when the grains are tender rather than pouring it all in at once.
- The spice bagSix "whole white peppers" are white peppercorns. Tie the cloves, peppercorns, bay and cinnamon in a square of cheesecloth or a tea infuser and pull it out before serving; loose cloves and a cinnamon shard in a mouthful of rice are unpleasant.
- Frying the riceFrying washed, dried rice "till yellow" is the hinge of the pilau. It coats each grain in fat so the finished dish stays separate rather than turning to porridge. Do not stir once the liquid is in and the fowl is set in its hollow.
- Weight of 3 eggsWeigh three eggs in their shells, then measure out that same weight of fat, of sugar and of flour. For large eggs this comes to about 6 oz (170 g) of each, which fills a 1.5-quart pudding basin.
- Steaming the puddingGrease the mould, press the raisins into the fat as decoration, and fill no more than two-thirds full. Cover with pleated foil or a cloth tied under the rim, stand it on a trivet in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up, and top up with boiling water over the two hours so it never runs dry.
- ServingThe pilau feeds four to six. "Serve hot with milk" means pouring cold or warm whole milk over the pudding at table, in the plain English manner; single cream or a thin custard is the modern equivalent.
Pilau entered English from Persian polow by way of Turkish pilav, reaching British kitchens largely through the East India Company; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookbooks spell it pillau, pilaw, pilaff and a dozen other ways. By the time this Crisco booklet appeared, a chicken pilau with almonds, raisins and a muslin bag of whole spices was standard Anglo-American company food, and its inclusion in a Calendar of Dinners shows how thoroughly it had been domesticated. The pudding is the other half of that same domestic tradition: puddings measured by the weight of eggs go back to the pound-cake principle of equal weights. What is new on the page is the fat. Crisco, the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening, was introduced in 1911, and books like this one were published to demonstrate that it could stand in for butter and lard across an entire year of menus.