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April 25
Menu: Vegetarian; Cream of Turnip Soup; Bean Croquettes, Tomato Sauce; Savory Rice; Lettuce Salad, French Dressing; Stewed Prunes Coffee Bean Croquettes-1 pint white beans, 1/2 cup cream, yolk 2 eggs, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1 teaspoon onion juice, 1 teaspoon salt, and pepper to taste. Soak beans over night, drain, cover them with fresh water, boil an hour, drain, throw away water, cover with fresh water and boil until tender; drain and press beans through colander. Rub Crisco and flour together, add cream, stir until almost boiling, then add yolks of eggs. Stir again for a minute over fire, add bean pulp and all seasonings; mix and turn out to cool. When cool, form into cylinders, dip in egg, roll in breadcrumbs and fry in hot Crisco. in hot Crisco. Serve with tomatosauce.
A bean croquette from Crisco's rotating dinner calendar, printed here under a stray heading from the day's menu. The mixture is essentially a thick bean panade, and its success depends entirely on how dry you get it before shaping.
- A pint of beansDry measure: about 2 cups of navy or other small white beans, roughly 14 oz. They will roughly double in bulk after soaking and yield some 5 cups cooked, which is enough for 12 to 16 croquettes, or four to six servings.
- The two-water boilThe instruction to boil an hour, discard that water, then boil again in fresh water is period practice, justified in the sources of the day as making the beans more digestible; it also leaches out some flavor and water-soluble vitamins. A single cooking in fresh water after an overnight soak will give much the same result.
- Get the pulp dryThis is the hinge. Beans pressed through a colander hold a great deal of water, and a wet mixture will burst in the fat. After combining, return the mass to the pan and stir over low heat until it pulls away from the sides in a single mound, then chill it thoroughly — an hour or more, or overnight — before shaping.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 as a vegetable shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil; the product has since been reformulated so that it is very low in trans fats, so it is not the same fat the book was written around. Butter works in the roux and any neutral high-smoke-point oil works for frying.
- Onion juiceA teaspoon of juice squeezed or grated from a raw onion, used when visible pieces were not wanted. Grate onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp in a cloth, or substitute a teaspoon of very finely minced onion softened in the fat first.
- Hot fatThe recipe says only 'hot Crisco'. For croquettes of this kind, aim for about 375°F, deep enough to float them. Fry two or three at a time so the temperature holds; at lower heat they absorb fat and slump.
- BreadingCrumb, chill again for fifteen minutes, then fry. A second pass through egg and crumbs gives a shell sturdy enough to survive the fat, which is worth doing with a soft filling like this one.
- Tomato sauceThe recipe says only 'Serve with tomato sauce', which in this period would mean a plain cooked sauce thin enough to pool on the plate rather than a long-simmered pasta sauce. Canned tomatoes cooked down with a little onion and salt will suit it.
Croquettes were a mainstay of American middle-class cookery from the 1880s through the 1920s: a bound purée, breaded and fried, that could be made from beans, rice, hominy, leftover fish or chicken and served as a main course on a meatless day. Bean croquettes belong to that meatless tradition, and their appearance in The Story of Crisco is not incidental — Procter & Gamble's 1913 book, later issued as a calendar of dinners, is organized by dated menus, and the recipes are built to use the new shortening in as many ways as possible, here twice in one dish, once in the roux and again in the frying kettle. Crisco contained no animal product, and P&G did later market it to Jewish and vegetarian cooks on that basis, though the well-known kosher campaign belongs to the following decades rather than to this book. The two-water boil appears widely in period cookbooks and domestic-science manuals, which treated dried legumes as needing to be purged as much as cooked.