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Chestnut Tartlets
Boil and mash 1 pint chestnuts, add 1/4 cup each creamed Crisco and cream, 1 beaten yolk, 1/4 cup powdered sugar, little salt, and 1 1/2 cups milk. Cover inverted small tartlet tins with Crisco pastry, bake, and fill with mixture, and bake again.
Rabbit, a la Marengo Cut up 1 rabbit into neat joints. Melt 1/2 cup Crisco in saucepan, put in rabbit and fry it quickly till browned, add 2 chopped small onions, and fry for a few minutes, pour off any fat into another pan, add to rabbit 1 cup brown sauce, 2 chopped tomatoes, 8 button mushrooms, seasoning of salt, pepper, and paprika. Put on lid and simmer gently 1 hour. Arrange rabbit on hot dish, put mushrooms in heaps round with thin lemon slices, season gravy and pour it over.
Two unrelated recipes have run together in this page: a sweet chestnut custard tartlet and a braised rabbit. Neither depends on the other, and the ingredient lists should be kept apart.
- Crisco means shorteningThis book was written to sell Crisco, so vegetable shortening appears everywhere, including in a sweet custard where butter would be the obvious choice. "Creamed Crisco" simply means shortening beaten soft and smooth before it goes in; substitute softened butter in the filling and either butter or shortening in the pastry.
- A pint of chestnutsChestnuts were commonly sold and measured by volume, and the recipe most likely means unshelled nuts. A pint in the shell weighs somewhere near a pound, with the peeled nutmeat coming to rather less. Score the flat side, boil 15-20 minutes, and peel while hot -- both the shell and the inner pellicle should come off, as the pellicle is bitter.
- The filling is a thin custardOne beaten yolk against 1 1/2 cups milk plus cream is a very loose set. Expect a pourable mixture that firms only slightly; if you want a filling that slices, a second yolk or a whole egg is closer to modern expectation.
- Inverted tinsThe pastry is draped over the outside of upturned tartlet moulds and baked into free-standing cups, an old trick that gives crisp shells without weights or beans. Chill the shaped pastry before baking so it does not slump off the tins.
- Oven temperaturesBake the empty shells at 400F until dry and pale gold, 12-15 minutes. Return the filled shells to a cooler oven, about 325F, until the custard is just set with a faint wobble -- high heat will curdle it and weep.
- YieldThe quantity should fill roughly a dozen small tartlet shells, more or less depending on the tin.
- Brown sauce for the rabbit"Brown sauce" here is espagnole or a well-reduced brown stock thickened with browned flour. A cup of good beef or veal stock plus a spoonful of beurre manie does the same job.
- Rabbit timing and fatA full hour of gentle simmering suits an older wild rabbit. Farmed rabbit, which is what you will buy now, is tender in 40-50 minutes and dries out past that. Half a cup of shortening for browning is far more than needed; two or three tablespoons is enough, which is presumably why the recipe tells you to pour the excess off.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco in 1911 and needed to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable fat could replace lard and butter in every corner of the kitchen -- hence shortening turning up in a chestnut custard. Chestnuts themselves were still a cheap autumn bulk food in America at that date, before the chestnut blight had finished off the eastern forests, and they were used much as potatoes were: boiled, mashed, sweetened, stuffed into poultry. The rabbit is named for Marengo, the 1800 battle in Piedmont, near Alessandria, and the dish is traditionally traced to a chicken supposedly improvised for Napoleon from what could be foraged nearby -- tomato, mushroom, garlic, egg, crayfish. The story is almost certainly later invention, but by 1915 "a la Marengo" had settled into a reliable culinary shorthand for a brown braise with tomato and mushroom, applied here to rabbit, then an everyday cheap meat rather than a specialty.