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For Pastry (Tablespoonfuls Crisco cupful)
6 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3/4 cupful flour 3/4 cupful potato flour 1 tablespoonful sugar 1/2 teaspoonful mixed spices 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful lemon juice Cold water
This is a formula rather than a set of instructions: the book gives quantities and assumes the cook already knows how to rub fat into flour. A few of the ingredients need translating before it will behave.
- No method is givenTreat it as standard short pastry: cut or rub the cold Crisco into the dry ingredients until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs, sprinkle in the lemon juice and just enough cold water to bring it together, then rest it in the refrigerator before rolling. Adding water beyond the point of cohesion is what makes this kind of pastry tough.
- Potato flourIn a book of this period "potato flour" means potato starch, the fine white powder sold today in the kosher or baking aisle, not the dried potato flour milled from whole cooked potato. Substituting the modern whole-potato product will give a heavy, sandy crust; cornstarch is a closer stand-in if starch is all you can find.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the current formula is no longer the all-cottonseed product of the 1910s, though it still works the same way in pastry. Six tablespoonfuls is 3/8 cup, about 75 g. Butter can replace it weight for weight, but butter carries water, so expect to need less of the added cold water.
- Mixed spices"Mixed spice" of this period is a sweet baking blend, usually built on cinnamon and nutmeg with allspice and often a little clove or coriander; proportions varied by household and brand, and it is closer to pumpkin pie spice than to anything savoury. Half a teaspoon in this quantity of flour is a background note, which together with the tablespoon of sugar suggests the crust was meant for a sweet filling.
- The lemon juiceA teaspoonful of acid was traditionally added in the belief that it slightly weakens the gluten and helps keep the dough tender and pale. At this quantity it is unlikely to read as a flavouring in the finished crust.
- Water quantityThe original simply says "cold water," which for this much flour usually means three to four tablespoons. Add it a spoonful at a time; the potato starch absorbs differently from batch to batch.
- Yield and bakingThis makes enough for one 8- or 9-inch tart shell or a single-crust pie. Blind-bake at 425F until set and lightly coloured, or follow the temperature given by whatever filling recipe it accompanies.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the recipe books that followed it, several of them written by Marion Harris Neil, had the job of persuading households that a shelf-stable vegetable shortening could stand in for lard and butter in everything from frying to fine pastry. Recipes throughout the book call for Crisco by name, and pastry was a crucial test case, since a crust made with the new fat had to prove itself as short and tender as one made the old way. Potato starch cut into wheat flour to lower the gluten and give a crumblier, more biscuit-like crust is a technique found in Continental and Jewish baking, which may be what lies behind its use here.