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Bakewell Tartlets
4 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 eggs 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful flour 1/2 teaspoonful baking powder 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1/2 teaspoonful lemon extract
This is a formula rather than a full recipe: the book gives quantities and assumes the cook knows what to do with them. Several things need filling in before it will work.
- No method is givenAs printed there is no mixing, shaping or baking instruction at all. Treated as written it is a creamed cake batter — fat and sugar beaten together, eggs added, then flour sifted with the baking powder and salt, flavoured with the lemon extract — spooned into small tart shells or patty tins.
- Where is the jam and the almond?A Bakewell tartlet is normally a pastry case lined with jam under an almond-rich filling. Neither appears here, and lemon extract stands in for almond. Expect a plain lemon-scented sponge tartlet; if you want the traditional article, line the tins with short pastry and put a teaspoon of raspberry jam in each before filling.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Modern Crisco has been reformulated and is no longer the same hydrogenated cottonseed product, but any solid vegetable shortening works. Four tablespoons is a quarter cup; butter gives better flavour at the cost of a slightly firmer crumb.
- TablespoonfulsIn this period a tablespoonful of sugar or fat means a level tablespoon, not the heaped spoon a modern cook might use. Four level tablespoons of sugar is about 50 g, which makes this a modestly sweet mixture by current standards.
- Baking powderHalf a teaspoon to a cup of flour is light leavening. Early twentieth-century baking powders varied in strength; today's double-acting powder is reliable at this ratio, so do not increase it.
- Oven and timeSmall tartlets want a fairly hot oven; 400F for 12 to 15 minutes should set and colour them without drying. The recipe as printed gives no oven direction, so this is a suggestion rather than the book's own.
- YieldOne cup of flour with two eggs gives roughly 12 small tartlets in a standard patty or muffin tin.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbooks written for a manufacturer: Procter & Gamble commissioned recipe collections to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco after its introduction in 1911, which is why shortening appears where an English cook of the same date would have written butter or suet. The tartlet itself descends from the Bakewell pudding of Derbyshire, a pastry case spread with jam and filled with an egg-and-almond mixture; the story that it began as a kitchen mistake at the Rutland Arms in Bakewell is traditional rather than documented, and the town still argues about the recipe. By the time it reached books like this one the dish had drifted a long way from its origin — the almonds gone, the jam gone, the name kept because it sold the idea of a small English tea cake.