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Vegetarian (Very fine blend Crisco)
very fine; blend Crisco with flour in saucepan over fire, add bean liquor, beans, salt and pepper, and yolks of eggs; turn out on to a dish and set aside till cold. Then cut out with cutlet-cutter or shape with knife; dip in beaten whites of the eggs, then in fine breadcrumbs, repeat a second time, and fry in hot Crisco. Serve on hot platter decorated with a few hot cooked mixed vegetables. Sufficient for eight cutlets.
The page as printed begins mid-sentence: the ingredient list and the first instruction (mashing or sieving cooked haricot beans "very fine") are on the preceding page. What survives is a complete method for a bound bean croquette shaped as a cutlet, and it works if you supply sensible proportions.
- The missing quantitiesNo amounts appear in the surviving text. For eight cutlets, work from roughly 1 lb cooked white beans, sieved, with a roux of about 2 tablespoons Crisco to 2 tablespoons flour and 1/2 cup bean liquor, plus two eggs separated. Treat these as reconstruction, not as the book's figures.
- The hinge: the paste must be cold and stiffThe mixture is a roux-bound paste of the croquette type, and it only cuts cleanly once fully cold and set, which is why the recipe says to turn it out and "set aside till cold" before shaping. Spread it fairly thin on a dish and give it several hours to firm up (a refrigerator is quickest, though the book assumes only a cool place); warm or slack paste will slump in the fat and burst the crumb coating.
- "Bean liquor"The cooking water from the beans, not a spirit. It carries starch and salt and binds better than plain water. Canned beans' liquid will do, though it is saltier -- season at the end.
- Blend Crisco with flour over fireThis is a white roux: cook it briefly without letting it colour, then add the liquor. The recipe puts the yolks in last; the book does not say to draw the pan off the fire, but doing so is the safer course, since yolks held over direct heat will scramble rather than thicken.
- Crisco itselfIn 1913 this was a newly launched hydrogenated cottonseed shortening; today's product is reformulated soybean and palm oil and is no longer partially hydrogenated. Any neutral solid shortening or a high-smoke-point oil behaves the same here.
- FryingThe recipe says only "fry in hot Crisco." By modern deep-frying practice that means fat at around 350-375F: cooler and the double crumb coating soaks, hotter and the crust colours before the inside is hot. A few minutes is enough, since everything in the cutlet is already cooked.
- Double crumbingThe instruction to "repeat a second time" is deliberate and worth following -- egg white, crumbs, egg white, crumbs. It is what keeps a soft bean paste from leaking into the fat.
- ServingEight cutlets is dinner for four as a main course with the hot mixed vegetables the recipe calls for, or eight as a first course.
The Story of Crisco was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that was neither butter nor lard, and its vegetarian chapter did double duty: it showed the shortening frying, sauteing and thickening, and it appealed to readers who avoided lard on religious or ethical grounds. The bean cutlet is a period genre of its own -- meatless croquettes moulded with a cutlet cutter and served with a paper frill or a fan of vegetables, so that the plate read as a chop even though it contained none. Nut, lentil and haricot "cutlets" fill the vegetarian sections of British and American cookery books from the 1890s onward, a legacy of the Victorian vegetarian societies and of the seasonal meatless cooking that Lent and Friday abstinence still demanded in many households.