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September 4
Menu: Noodle Soup Lamb Chops; Cauliflower French Fried Potatoes; Watercress Salad; Plum Tart; Coffee Cauliflower-Boil and drain 1 cauliflower and dredge top with pepper and salt, sprinkle with grated cheese, and pour little melted Crisco over it. Set in oven for 5 minutes to brown, and serve surrounded with tomato sauce.
A menu-calendar entry rather than a fully written recipe, so the quantities are left to the cook. The instructions are complete enough to follow if you supply the missing numbers.
- The hinge: do not overboilA whole head boiled until fully tender will collapse when you dredge and brown it. Boil in well-salted water 8-10 minutes for florets, 12-15 for a whole trimmed head, until a knife meets slight resistance, then drain thoroughly and let the steam escape or the cheese topping will sit on a wet surface.
- "Set in oven for 5 minutes to brown"Five minutes only browns at high heat. Use 450F, or put it under a broiler for 2-3 minutes and watch it. A moderate oven will simply dry the cheese without colouring it.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Melted shortening here is a flavourless fat that helps the cheese crisp; melted butter does the same job and tastes better. Roughly 2 tablespoons for one head.
- Grated cheesePeriod American recipes of this kind use either a dry cheese of the Cheddar type or grated Parmesan; the book leaves the choice open. Two to three ounces, grated fine, is enough to cover a medium head.
- Tomato sauceNot the modern jarred pasta sauce. Period tomato sauce for vegetables was a thin cooked purée, often with a little onion and a butter-flour thickening, poured around rather than over the dish so the browned top stays crisp.
- YieldOne medium head serves four as a side dish, two as a light supper course.
- About the run-on textThe line ending "September 5 Hot Boiled Tongue, Lemon Sauce" is the start of the next day's menu in the calendar, not part of the cauliflower. Ignore it.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a wholly new product: a hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a solid white shortening, launched in 1911 as a substitute for lard and other cooking fats, butter among them. The recipes and the year-long "Calendar of Dinners" -- which fills much of the expanded editions that also circulated under the title A Calendar of Dinners -- were written to put Crisco into every category of cooking, including places where fat was barely needed, which is why a dish of cauliflower and cheese gets a spoonful of melted shortening poured over it. The dish itself is a plain version of cauliflower au gratin, on English and American tables well before Crisco existed; the tomato sauce poured around the base was a common turn-of-the-century way to give a white vegetable colour on the plate.