Butter and margarine will produce tougher and denser products since the water hydrates the starch. Still, butter tastes better and some cooks prefer to use it, even though the product is not as tender. Remember that when you use butter or margarine in a biscuit, pie crust, or other dough, you will probably need less water. Vegetable shortening was invented by by the Proctor and Gamble company.
The company developed the product as an alternative to lard and tallow used for soaps or candles, which were getting to be too expensive. But in the company decided to expand the market for Crisco and introduced it to American cooks as a more healthy and digestible substitute for lard or butter. Although Proctor and Gamble is not a Jewish company many people have thought so , they also recognized that the product would be valuable to Jewish cooks, since is was pareve , or neutral, making it suitable for combining with dairy or meat.
Crisco is definitely the most well-known brand of shortening in existence, after all, Crisco has become a generic designation for any vegetable shortening.
It was so successful that it kept selling well even through the Great Depression, even though lard and butter were much less expensive another story. But it was not without its early competitors, with names like Snowdrift , Flake White , and Nyafat. Margarine, made from partially hydrogenated oil, was originally formulated by a French pharmacist in as a replacement for butter, and was not the same as what we have now, being based on beef tallow. Margarine today, as mentioned above, does not contain one hundred partially hydrogenated oil and will probably contain additional liquid oil, such as soybean.
Water is usually the first ingredient. Hydrogenated oils like Crisco shortening, on the other hand, are one hundred percent fat and are meant to lack any discernible flavor and make it a high plastic fat.
Bleaching with steam was developed in and with fuller's earth in the s. Refining with caustic soda and deodorizing were developed in the s. In the first half of the 19th century there is increasing mention of the growing scarcity of oils and fats in Europe.
The advent of meat canning and cold storage of whole carcasses further reduced supplies of fat. The greatest pressure prior to had been to produce more hard fats for candles and oil for lamps, but by the late s there were increasing pressures to produce substitutes for edible fats as well, especially butter.
This led to the development of margarine by Mege Mouris in France in as described in the next section. The key ingredient in margarine was oleo oil, pressed from edible tallow. With the growth of the margarine industry, large quantities of edible oleostearine, the by-product of oleo oil production, became available. In Europe, relatively little of this was used in foods; it continued to be used in tallow candles until the early s, when it was gradually replaced by the petroleum-based paraffin-wax candle.
But in America it became the basis of an entire new industry, making lard substitutes. The earliest records of the production of compounded cooking fats on a household scale in Europe date from the first half of the 19th century. They were probably produced at a much earlier date. There was even some commercial production in the mids, but the first large scale production of lard substitutes and shortenings developed in the United States.
There are several reasons that these products never became very popular in Europe until after World War II: 1 Northern Europeans preferred lard; 2 Inexpensive margarine was widely available and came to be used in cooking in many of the ways Americans used shortenings; in Europe both table margarines and cooking or industrial margarines were developed; 3 As early as there was legal prosecution of lard compounds in England under the Sale of Foods Act.
This may have discouraged further experimentation on the Continent as well; 4 Europe did not grow a lot of oilseeds, which were the raw material for shortening; 5 Europeans did not traditionally use lard or shortening in basic breads; Americans did. To help make up its deficit in food oils and fats, Europe started in about to use relatively saturated vegetable fats, as from coconut and palm oils, which had long been imported for use in the candle and soap industries, as a substitute for animal fats in foods.
Europe also imported huge quantities of lard from America, just as in the period following World War II it began to import huge quantities of soybeans from America to process into oil and meal. Prior to the main producer of shortening in Europe was the UK, followed by Germany. The same year Germany produced only 16, tonnes, compared with , tones for the USA Schwitzer By the s, with low-cost edible oils widely available from the US and lard prices steadily increasing, shortening production in Europe was increasing steadily.
UK production in had risen to , tonnes, while German shortening production had risen to 51, tonnes vs. According to Gander , the leading European countries in terms of per capita consumption of shortenings and compounds were as follows figures for margarine are given in parentheses for comparison : Netherlands 7.
Germany 3. By comparison, USA consumption was 7. Unfortunately we have very little information?? When was soy oil first used? When and why did it first start to be widely used? But cottonseed oil is still one of the most widely consumed edible oils in the country. It's a routine ingredient in processed foods, and it's commonplace in restaurant fryers. Crisco would have never become a juggernaut without its aggressive advertising campaigns that stressed the purity and modernity of factory production and the reliability of the Crisco name.
In the wake of the Pure Food and Drug Act — which made it illegal to adulterate or mislabel food products and boosted consumer confidence — Crisco helped convince Americans that they didn't need to understand the ingredients in processed foods, as long as those foods came from a trusted brand.
In the decades that followed Crisco's launch, other companies followed its lead, introducing products like Spam , Cheetos and Froot Loops with little or no reference to their ingredients. Once ingredient labeling was mandated in the U. But for the most part, they kept on eating. So if you don't find it strange to eat foods whose ingredients you don't know or understand, you have Crisco partly to thank. So are The Conversation's authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Live Science. See all comments 0. Starting in the s the meat packing industry, centered in Chicago, began a major involvement with shortening.
A number of major meat packing firms, including Swift and Co. Armour's earliest brand was Vegetole, registered in By US shortening consumption had climbed to about one-third that of lard. It would rise briefly to equal that of lard in Noting the trend, meat packers had started buying their own cottonseed mills by and their own refineries by The meat packers made compounds or blended shortenings, containing both animal and vegetable fats, a practice they continued into the period after World War II, although by then a large proportion of their output was purely vegetable shortenings.
Introduction of Hydrogenation and Soy Oil The development of the process of catalytic hydrogenation in the early s as described earlier and its application to the production of shortening in the US starting in about quickly transformed the shortening industry.
Prior to that time, it was not possible to convert liquid oils to solid fats, except by mixing in hard fats such as stearine from beef or lard. The cottonseed oil companies grew increasingly concerned over their dependence on their competitors for one of their key ingredients, hard animal stearine and the limited supply of those fats.
Chemists at the cottonseed oil companies intensified their search for suitable substitutes for oleostearine and tallow, and soon discovered that these substitutes were to be found within the resources of their own laboratories. Hydrogenation, in short, liberated shortening manufacturers from their dependence on the meat packing industry, while also improving the stability of the oils. Hydrogenation ushered in a new era of shortening manufacture. Initially they started experimental production and wholesale marketing of a shortening containing hydrogenated oil and a very small amount of oleostearine, but they soon dropped the oleostearine to make an all-vegetable-oil product.
Its absence of any animal fat was featured in the company's fabulously expensive and persistent nationwide advertising campaign. Crisco's bland flavor, whiteness, stability resistance to oxidative rancidity , uniformity, and general good performance as a shortening and cooking fat soon won it the favor of both housewives and bakers. By the effects of the hydrogenation process were beginning to manifest themselves and in that year the production of shortening was estimated to be more than half that of lard.
By the start of World War I in hydrogenation had achieved considerable importance. The earliest known reference to soy oil in connection with shortening was in , when Ellis in US Patent 1,,, recommended the use of hydrogenated soy oil in making a "lard substitute.
The peak use of soy oil in shortenings prior to World War I paragraph or page missing here at bottom of page!!.?? There were three main reasons for the very limited use of soy oil in shortenings during this period. First, it was not widely available since a tariff had cut off imports in and domestic production was just getting started. Second, it was rarely less expensive and usually slightly more expensive than cottonseed oil during this period.
And third, as Weber and Alsberg noted in ,". Cottonseed oil continued to be by far the predominant ingredient in shortening during World War I and the postwar period. The two main animal fats used were oleostearine and edible tallow. During the early s major changes were taking place in the structure of the shortening industry. The introduction of hydrogenation and all-vegetable shortenings split the industry and set it on two divergent courses.
The meat packers continued to make shortenings of the compound or blended type, but only as a sideline. They used hydrogenation though in small amounts only for the manufacture of highly hardened cottonseed oil or vegetable stearine, to serve as an occasional substitute for stearine.
The cottonseed oil manufacturers, on the other hand, made vegetable shortening as a main product and they promoted it heavily. Because cottonseed oil was produced mainly in the southern states, the center of activity in the shortening industry moved there from Chicago. By the late s Texas and Tennessee were the leaders in shortening production, with Illinois a distant third. Total shortening production that year was , tonnes million lb.
The meat packers had now moved heavily into production and refining of cottonseed oil, and in the Big Five led by Swift produced In America both lard and cottonseed oil were produced in surplus. The country basically decided to convert the cottonseed oil into lard substitutes and export the lard. From the s until World War I large quantities of shortening were exported to Europe the peak was 16, tonnes in and to the West Indies the peak was 14, tonnes in By the start of World War I a largely vegetable oil cooking fat had been able to make a place for itself in a market long almost completely dominated by lard, and the shortening industry had reached maturity.
US per capita lard consumption was remarkably constant from , averaging about 5. The earliest statistics for shortening show per capita consumption of at least 3. Clearly World War I was a boon for shortening. During the war, bakers were required to use vegetable-oil shortening exclusively in bread to allow lard to be exported to northern Europe, where people were not accustomed to using compound.
Many bakers learned for the first time how to use shortening and found that it was a quality product. These statistics also demonstrate clearly that shortening found a market in addition to rather than only as a substitute for lard, for lard consumption stayed steady as shortening consumption rose. Indeed shortening found a new market in large part by attracting those who used little or no lard, including Jews, Moslems, and vegetarians, as well as cost conscious industry users such as bakers and confectioners.
The Rise of Soy Oil Soy oil did not start to be a major ingredient in shortening until the late s, but important developments took place after that prepared for its rise to prominence.
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