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Vegetable Pie
1/4 cupful melted Crisco 1 cupful sliced beans 6 potatoes 2 carrots 1 parsnip 1½ head celery 1 cupful peas 4 tomatoes Pepper and salt to taste Sufficient white vegetable stock to cover 1 teaspoonful powdered herbs Peel and slice potatoes and partly boil them. Then prepare parsnip, carrots, celery and onions, and cook them for fifteen minutes. Grease large fireproof dish and place in all vegetables in layers, with herbs, Crisco, salt and pepper to taste. Pour in white stock, cover with layer of sliced potatoes and bake in moderate oven for one and a half hours. Sufficient for one large savory pie.
EGGS W HEN there is any doubt as to the freshness of eggs, they may be tested in various ways. Quite fresh eggs will sink in a strong brine, and as they become stale they remain suspended at different depths in the brine, until an absolutely stale egg will float. Successful preservation depends in a great measure upon the condition of the egg at the time of preserving. Different methods of preserving all aim at the same thing, namely, at coating the porous shell with some substance which will prevent the air entering and setting up decomposition. See page 30.
When used as food, eggs should be cooked at a low temperature-about 160° F., or if in the shell at about 180° F. The time varies with the size of the egg, from two and a half minutes for poaching a medium-sized egg to four and a half minutes for boiling a large one. If too much cooked, or at too high a temperature, the white becomes tough, hard, and to many people, indigestible.
When required for salads, garnishing, etc., the eggs must be boiled from ten to twenty minutes, and if the yolks are to be powdered for sprinkling, they must be cooked for a longer time, or the centers will be somewhat tough and elastic, and useless for the purpose.
In beating eggs, a little salt added to the whites helps to bring them to a froth more quickly. When frothed whites are to be mixed with a heavier or more solid substance, great care must be taken not to break down the froth. The object of beating being to mix in air, rough handling afterwards would render the beating useless; the mixing must therefore be done very carefully. They should be folded or wrapped up in the other substance, but the mixing also must be thorough, for any pieces of white separated from the rest will toughen and taste leathery, besides failing in the special purpose of giving lightness to the mixture. After mixing lightly and perfectly all such preparations Eggs should be cooked at once. The white "speck" always should be removed from a broken egg, as it is easily distinguished after cooking, and in anything of a liquid nature, such as custards, sauces, etc., it would be hard and unpleasant.
A layered baked vegetable dish rather than a pastry pie, with sliced potatoes standing in for a crust. The ingredient list and the method disagree in a couple of places, so read both before starting.
- Missing onionsThe method tells you to prepare and cook onions, but they never appear in the ingredient list. Two medium onions, sliced, fits the scale of the dish.
- "1½ head celery"Possibly a typesetting slip for half a head; a head and a half is a great deal against two carrots and one parsnip. Half a head, sliced, is a safer reading.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350°F. An hour and a half suits the volume of vegetables. The recipe gives no temperature and says nothing about covering the dish.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, sold to replace lard and butter. A quarter cupful melted is roughly 55 g; any neutral oil or melted butter does the same work here, which is to keep the layers from drying and to carry the herbs.
- White vegetable stockAn unbrowned stock made from onion, celery, leek and root trimmings — pale, not the dark roasted kind. Any light vegetable stock works; you will need roughly 2 to 3 cups to come up level with the vegetables.
- Par-boilingThe potatoes go in barely cooked and the root vegetables get fifteen minutes, because everything finishes in the oven. Do not cook them through first or the finished pie will be mush.
- The top layerSlice the reserved potatoes thinly and overlap them. The recipe gives no instruction to cover the dish at any stage.
- Tomatoes and peasThe four tomatoes never appear in the method; presumably they go into the layers raw, and they will release liquid, so err on the low side with the stock. The cupful of peas would have been fresh shelled or canned; frozen peas added late hold their colour better.
- Yield"One large savory pie" is six to eight servings as a main course in a 9x13 dish or a 3-quart casserole.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, who had introduced the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening two years earlier and needed to teach cooks what to do with a fat that was neither lard nor butter. Meatless cookery did particular work for the company: because Crisco contained no animal product, it could be promoted to Jewish households, and a meatless pie bound with vegetable stock made that argument on the page. The dish itself is older than the fat — a layered root-vegetable bake under a potato lid is standard British and Irish cottage cooking, and "white stock" here simply borrows the classical distinction between pale and browned stocks. The appended notes on eggs are from the book's reference matter and belong to a period when preserving eggs in waterglass or lime was ordinary household practice.