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November 19
Menu: Spare Ribs Stew; Rice Croquettes Waldorf Salad; Cheese Biscuits; Cranberry Pudding Coffee Cranberry Pudding-Cream 1/2 cup Crisco with 1 cup sugar, add 3 eggs well beaten, 1/2 cup milk, 3½ cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon almond extract, then stir in 1/2 cups cranberries, turn into Criscoed mold, cover with greased paper and steam 4 hours. Serve with milk. Baked Onions November 20 Jellied Baked Beans Cranberry Bavarian Cream Coffee Stewed Rabbit-Melt 4 tablespoons Crisco in saucepan; joint rabbit and fry quickly in Crisco, then fry 1 sliced onion until browned, stir in Oyster Croquettes Stuffed Lamb Chops Chestnut Puree Mashed Potatoes Egg Plant Fritters Kumquat and Endive Salad Stewed Figs Coffee Stuffed Lamb Chops-Wipe 6 French sliced onion until browned, stir in chops, cut 1½ inches thick. Split meat in halves, cutting to bone. Cook 2½ tablespoons Crisco and 1 tablespoon chopped onion 5 minutes; remove onion, add ½ cup chopped mushroom, and cook 5 minutes; add 2 tablespoons flour, 3 tablespoons stock, 1 teaspoon chopped parsley, 14 teaspoon salt, and few grains red pepper. Spread mixture between layers of chops, press together lightly, wrap in Criscoed paper cases, and broil 10 minutes. Serve with chestnut puree.
A steamed cranberry pudding lifted from a November day in the book's dinner calendar; the surrounding lines ("Coffee", "Baked Onions", "November 20") are menu fragments, not part of the method. A few of the quantities as printed need judgment before you start.
- CriscoPlain hydrogenated vegetable shortening, sold from 1911 as an all-purpose substitute for lard and butter. Modern Crisco is reformulated but behaves the same way in a creamed batter; unsalted butter works, though it browns and softens the crumb slightly.
- "1/2 cups cranberries"A typographical casualty. The intended amount is almost certainly 1½ cups of whole raw berries, which is what a pudding of this size will carry; half a cup would barely register. Use fresh or frozen, unthawed, tossed in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- The flour-to-liquid ratioThree and a half cups of flour against half a cup of milk and three eggs gives a paste stiff enough to stand a spoon in, even allowing for the juice the berries release. A figure closer to 1½ to 2 cups of flour would suit a pudding of this size. If the batter will not drop from the spoon, the original figure is the suspect measure, not your mixing.
- Almond extractHalf a teaspoon in a pudding this size is assertive by current taste; a quarter teaspoon reads as more balanced against the fruit.
- The mold and the paperA 1½ to 2 quart pudding basin or lidded steamed-pudding mold, greased well and filled no more than two-thirds. The greased paper (parchment now, ideally with a pleat folded across the middle) keeps condensation off the surface; tie or clip it down or steam will lift it.
- SteamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot, water halfway up the sides, lid on, kept at a bare simmer. Four hours is genuine for a dense pudding of this size, but the water will need topping up with boiling water two or three times; letting the pot run dry is the usual way this dish fails.
- Serving"Serve with milk" means cold milk or thin cream poured over each portion, the plain end of the period's pudding sauces. Hard sauce or a warm vanilla custard suits it equally. Serves eight to ten, and it reheats by steaming for twenty minutes.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no culinary tradition behind it: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911 as a shortening that did not smell of the barnyard, kept without refrigeration, and cost less than butter. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" gave a full menu for every day of the year, which is why this pudding sits wedged between coffee and baked onions with no ceremony at all. The dish itself is older than the fat: boiled and steamed puddings in a cloth or a mold were standard winter cookery in Britain and New England, and cranberries, harvested in the northeastern bogs in autumn and keeping well into the cold months, were the November fruit of choice.
This entry survives only as a fragment — it breaks off mid-sentence at "stir in," and the page heading has been garbled somewhere between the original book and its transcription. What remains is the opening of a standard braised rabbit, and the method is recoverable from the technique alone.
- The text is incompleteThe instructions stop after browning the onion. Anything after "stir in" — almost certainly flour, then stock or water, and seasoning — is missing. Treat this as a browning method rather than a full recipe, and finish it from a current braise you trust.
- CriscoStill sold, and the closest modern equivalent to what the book means: a solid, flavourless hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Four tablespoons is a generous amount for browning; two is enough in a heavy pan, and butter or a neutral oil behaves the same way here.
- Jointing the rabbitA whole rabbit divides into two front legs, two hind legs, and the saddle cut into two or three pieces. The ribcage and belly flaps are thin and go to the stockpot rather than the stew.
- "Fry quickly"This means high heat and colour, not cooking through. Rabbit is lean and dries out fast, so brown the pieces in batches for a few minutes a side and remove them before the onion goes in, or they will steam in the crowded pan.
- The onionThe onion goes into the same fat after the meat, so it picks up the browned residue left in the pan. Let it go properly golden rather than merely soft.
- Finishing a braise of this kindFarmed rabbit needs roughly 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering, barely bubbling, until the hind-leg meat pulls from the bone. Wild rabbit is tougher and older and can take half again as long.
- YieldOne rabbit of about 2 1/2 to 3 lb serves three to four with potatoes or noodles.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to teach American cooks what to do with a product that had no precedent in their kitchens: a shelf-stable, hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening that behaved like lard but was not lard. The book's strategy is visible in entries like this one — take a thoroughly familiar dish and simply substitute Crisco for the butter or drippings the cook would otherwise have reached for. Stewed rabbit was an unremarkable choice in 1913, when rabbit was cheap, widely available, and frequently home-raised or shot; it appears in American and British household cookery throughout the nineteenth century and only retreated from the mainstream table after the middle of the twentieth.
A stuffed chop cooked in a greased paper case — an early twentieth-century version of what a French kitchen would call en papillote. The mushroom filling is a thick duxelles bound with flour and stock, and it must be cool and stiff before it goes between the halves of the chop.
- French chops"French sliced" or Frenched means the fat and meat scraped clean from the end of the rib bone. Ask for rib chops cut 1½ inches thick, Frenched; that thickness is what allows the split-and-stuff treatment.
- Splitting the chopCut horizontally through the meaty side down to the bone, making a pocket rather than two separate pieces. A thinner chop will simply fall apart.
- CriscoCrisco was new hydrogenated vegetable shortening when this book was published and the recipes exist to sell it. Butter or a neutral oil does the same job here; 2½ tablespoons is what you need to sweat the onion and mushroom.
- The filling must be coldCook the mushroom mixture down until it is thick and pasty, then chill it. Warm, loose filling will run out of the chop the moment it meets heat.
- StockThree tablespoons is all that is wanted — this is a binder, not a sauce. Use lamb or veal stock if you have it, otherwise chicken.
- Salt quantityThe salt measure in the original has lost its fraction and cannot be reconstructed with confidence. Season the filling to taste; roughly a quarter teaspoon suits this volume of mushroom.
- Paper casesCut parchment hearts or rectangles large enough to fold over each chop with a sealed crimped edge, and grease the inside. Parchment, not waxed paper, and keep the packet away from a naked broiler element — it will scorch.
- Broiling timeTen minutes under a domestic broiler will not cook a 1½-inch stuffed chop through the paper. Expect 15 to 20 minutes, turning once, and check for 130-135F at the centre for pink lamb.
- YieldAs written the filling and fat quantities suit six chops, which serves three to six people depending on the rest of the menu.
This entry comes from a dated dinner calendar, a common device in promotional cookbooks of the 1910s: a dish for every day of the year, each one calling for the sponsor's product. Cooking meat in a greased paper case was a fashionable restaurant technique of the period, imported from French practice, and it appears in American household books partly because it looked professional and partly because it kept juices and cheap shortening in contact with the meat. The chestnut puree served alongside places the dish firmly in late autumn, a seasonal marker before blight had destroyed the native crop.