Home › Pastries › For Filling (Tablespoonfuls Crisco cupful)
For Filling (Tablespoonfuls Crisco cupful)
6 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3/4 cupful sugar 1 lemon 3 eggs 1/2 cupful blanched powdered almonds 1/4 teaspoonful salt Make short crust of Crisco, flour, salt, and water. Roll out thin and line Criscoed pie plate with piece of paste.
For filling. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, almonds, salt, grated rind and one tablespoonful lemon juice. Mix well and spread one-half of mixture on to pastry. Then cover with a layer of pastry, the rest of mixture, and lastly cover with pastry. Bake in a moderate oven until brown. Ore the pastry may be rolled out, brushed over with melted Crisco, the mixture spread over it, and rolled up to form a roly-poly. Lay on a Criscoed tin and bake in moderate oven until brown.
Sufficient for one large pie.
Flake Pastry No. 1 2 cupfuls flour 8 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3/4 teaspoonful salt Just enough cold water to hold dough together Sift flour and salt and cut half the Crisco into flour with knife until it is finely divided. The finger tips may be used to finish blending materials. Then add water sparingly, mixing it with knife through dry materials. Form with the hand into dough and roll out on a floured board to quarter inch thickness. Spread one-third of remaining Crisco on two-thirds of dough nearest you; fold twice, to make three layers, folding in first that part on which Crisco has not been spread. Turn dough, putting folded edges to the sides; roll out, spread and fold as before. Repeat once more. Use a light motion in handling rolling-pin, and roll from center outward. Should Crisco be too hard, it will not mix readily with flour, in which case the result will be a tough crust. Sufficient for two covered pies.
Flake Pastry No. 2 1/2 teaspoonful salt 2 cupfuls flour 1/2 cupful Crisco Cold water Mix salt with flour; divide Crisco into four equal parts, rub in one of these only, and then mix to stiff paste with a little cold water. Shape into neat oblong piece, and roll into straight strip about three times as long as it is broad. All over this put on, with the point of knife, one of remaining quarters of Crisco, distributing it evenly in little dabs about size of a pea, so that they look like buttons on a card. Now flour surface lightly and fold past exactly in three by taking hold of the two bottom corners and doubling them upwards from you and then of the top corners and doubling them downwards towards you. Turn now at right angles to its former position so as to have open ends pointing towards you. Press these quickly together with the roller to inclose some air, and press paste across also in two or three places, making little ridges, thus preventing air which has been shut in, from forming into large bubble. Roll out again, and repeat till remaining two parts of Crisco have thus been used. At the last rolling, bring to required thickness; and if it needs widening as well as lengthening, turn it at right angles to its former position, and roll straight across it as before, a rule which, with flaky pastry, should always be observed, since, unlike the short pastries, its lightness suffers if rolled obliquely to the direction in which it has been folded.
Sufficient for two small pies.
A layered almond-and-lemon pie from one of the early Crisco promotional cookbooks, filed under "Sandwiches" because the filling is sandwiched between three sheets of pastry. The filling list is complete, but the crust ingredients are given only by name, with quantities in the Flake Pastry recipes printed below.
- The hinge: keep the fat coldBoth pastries depend on the shortening staying firm enough to stay in discrete layers through the folding. Note that the book's own warning runs the other way: if the Crisco is too hard it will not mix readily with the flour and the result will be a tough crust. Chill the fat and the rolled dough between turns.
- Crisco has been reformulatedThe Crisco of this book was hydrogenated cottonseed oil; the current product is a soybean-and-palm blend, reformulated to remove trans fat. Handling properties are not identical, so work quickly or refrigerate if the fat softens. Chilled butter or lard is a reasonable alternative for the flake pastries.
- "Criscoed" simply means greasedCriscoed pie plate, Criscoed tin — grease with shortening. The verb was house style in these books, which existed to put the brand name on every line.
- A moderate ovenConventionally taken as around 350F, though the book states no temperature and gives no times. The roly-poly, being thinner, will brown sooner than the layered pie. Bake until the top is evenly golden and the filling is set rather than to the clock.
- Blanched powdered almondsSkinned almonds ground fine; shop almond flour is the closest equivalent (almond meal is frequently ground with the skins left on). The half cupful is measured after grinding, not as whole nuts before.
- The pastry quantityFlake Pastry No. 1 is given as sufficient for two covered pies, so one batch supplies the three sheets this filling needs. No. 2 uses the same quantities of flour and Crisco but is stated as sufficient for two small pies; its dotted-fat, air-trapping method is the more laminated of the two.
- Vent the topThree sheets of pastry over a wet egg filling will steam. Cut slits in the top crust or the layers will lift and the filling will run at the edge.
- Yield and servingSufficient for one large pie, per the book. It is sweet and dense, and may be preferred at room temperature rather than hot.
Crisco went on sale in 1911, and Procter & Gamble sold it partly through a run of free and cheap cookbooks in which every recipe, whatever it was, called for the product by name; Marion Harris Neil wrote several of them, including A Calendar of Dinners. The result is a period document as much as a cookbook: an all-vegetable shortening was a genuinely new thing in the American kitchen, competing against lard and butter, and the books had to demonstrate that it could do everything both of those did, from frying to flaky pastry. The two Flake Pastry methods printed here show the range — the first is the familiar folded short-and-flaky crust, the second an older English-style laminated paste in which the fat is dotted on in pea-sized buttons and air is deliberately trapped and then ridged across so it cannot form one large bubble. The filling itself, ground almonds creamed with sugar, eggs and lemon, is a long-standing British tart mixture, layered here between three sheets of pastry rather than baked open.