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Fruit Tart
2 pounds fruit, 1 cup sugar, ginger, 2 cups flour, 6 tablespoons Crisco, and baking powder. If tart is to be made of rhubarb, it should we well washed (not skinned) and cut up in inch lengths, packed tightly into dish, sugar sprinkled among it, also 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger. If made of gooseberries, they should be picked clean, washed, and put in dish with little cinnamon. If apples are used, they must be peeled and sliced very thinly, sugar sprinkled among them, and little lemon peel grated, or 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon. In no case put water in. Paste. Put flour in basin with dessertspoon, sugar, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 6 tablespoons Crisco, and crumble latter among flour until all lumps have disappeared, then pour in cold water to make stiff paste; turn it out on board and roll it a little larger than size of dish; after wetting it, cut off band of paste to put round edge of dish; wet band again and place remainder paste on. Press it down very lightly, to make edges adhere; pare and notch them neatly according to taste; brush top with cold water, and dust fine sugar over, then put in oven to bake for 1 hour. When fruit tart begins to boil out at side it is usually ready.
This is an English deep-dish fruit tart: a single crust laid over raw fruit in a pie dish, with no bottom pastry and no thickener. A few conventions in the wording need translating.
- The dishUse a deep pie dish with a rim, roughly 1 1/2 quarts. The fruit is packed in tightly because it will collapse considerably as it cooks; a loosely filled dish leaves the crust suspended over a gap.
- Crisco and the pastry ratioSix tablespoons of shortening to two cups of flour is a lean crust by modern standards. All-vegetable shortening still exists and behaves as intended; an equal weight of chilled butter or lard gives more flavour and a shorter crumb.
- A dessertspoonTwo teaspoons. It goes into the pastry, not the fruit, and is the only sugar the crust gets besides the dusting on top.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A pastry-topped fruit tart of this kind wants 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the crust, then 350F for the remainder, roughly an hour in total.
- No water, on purposeRhubarb, gooseberries and apples all release plenty of liquid. Adding water gives a flooded, pale filling. Expect juice to escape at the rim, which is the doneness cue the recipe names.
- Rhubarb leaves"Not skinned" means do not peel the stalks. It does not concern the leaves, which contain oxalic acid and are not eaten; trim them off and discard.
- Sweetening by fruitOne cup of sugar suits apples and rhubarb. Gooseberries, especially green ones, generally want half again as much.
- The pastry bandThe strip of dough pressed onto the wetted rim gives the lid something to grip. Without it the top has little to adhere to and is more likely to shrink inward as it bakes.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Best warm rather than hot, with cream.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s as a promotional cookbook for Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company had introduced in 1911 — which is why a plain fruit tart specifies the brand by name rather than simply calling for fat. The tart itself is much older and thoroughly English: a deep dish of raw fruit under a single sheet of pastry, with no base crust, sugar layered among the fruit and nothing added to thicken the juice. Ginger with rhubarb and cinnamon or lemon peel with apple are common nineteenth-century pairings.