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Apricot Tarts
2 cupfuls flour 1/2 cupful Crisco 4 tablespoonfuls sugar 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 egg 2 teaspoonfuls vanilla extract 1 teaspoonful baking powder Apricot jam or jelly Whipped cream Angelica Preserved cherries Rub Crisco into flour, add salt, sugar, baking powder, break egg in and mix well with fork, then add vanilla. Roll out, cut with cutter and lie Criscoed tartlet tins with the rounds. Line with paper and put in some rice or peas to keep paste from rising; bake in hot oven twenty minutes. Remove rice and papers. When pastries are cold put in each one a spoonful of the jam or jelly. Fill with whipped cream and decorate with cherries and angelica. Sufficient for thirty tarts.
A sweet shortcrust blind-baked in tartlet tins, then filled cold. The dough is stiff and unusually dry, and the stated oven time is the thing most likely to burn you.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works; the recipe is from a book P&G published to sell it. Butter gives more flavour but a softer, more fragile shell, and you may need a spoonful less liquid.
- The dough is dry as writtenTwo cups of flour with half a cup of fat and one egg will not come together into a rollable sheet in most kitchens. Add ice water a teaspoon at a time until it just coheres, and chill it for 30 minutes before rolling.
- "Hot oven" and twenty minutesThe recipe gives no temperature; period sources put a hot oven somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Small blind-baked tartlet shells at that heat are likely to be done well before twenty minutes, so check at 10, remove the paper and rice then, and give them a few more minutes to dry out the base.
- Rice or peasStandard blind-baking weights. Dried beans or ceramic pie weights do the same job. Keep a jar of them for the purpose; they are no longer good for eating after a few bakes.
- AngelicaCandied stems of Angelica archangelica, sold in bright green batons and once standard cake decoration. It is hard to find now; candied citron peel, pistachio, or a strip of candied lime peel stands in for the colour.
- Preserved cherriesNot maraschino as sold today but cherries in heavy syrup or glace cherries. Drain and blot them well or they will weep into the cream.
- Assembly timingFill only shortly before serving. Jam and whipped cream both soften a baked shell within an hour or two, and these are thin.
- YieldThirty tarts from this quantity of dough implies very small tins, on the order of two inches. In standard 2 1/2 to 3 inch tartlet tins expect noticeably fewer, and roll the scraps once only.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble, the same partnership that produced The Story of Crisco; the book is a year of menus built to demonstrate that the new hydrogenated shortening could do everything butter and lard did. That is why Crisco appears by name in the pastry here rather than a generic "shortening." The finished tart itself is thoroughly Edwardian confectioner's work: a blind-baked sweet shell, jam at the bottom, whipped cream over, and the two decorations that signalled a proper pastry counter in that era, glace cherry and green angelica. Angelica had been candied in Europe since at least the seventeenth century and was standard garnish stock until it quietly fell out of the trade in the middle of the twentieth.