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Lemon and Apple Tart
Line a large pie plate with Crisco pastry. Mix together 2 cups grated apple, grated ring and juice of 1 lemon, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 eggs, beaten without separating whites and yolks, 2 tablespoons melted Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1 cup thin cream. Turn into plate lined with pastry, wet edge, and put strips of pastry over top of filling. Finish with strip of pastry on edge. Let bake until firm in center.
A custard tart in the guise of a lattice pie: grated raw apple and lemon set with eggs and cream. The original gives no oven temperature and no time, which is the main gap to fill.
- Oven and timingThe original specifies neither temperature nor time; nothing in the text indicates which oven the author had in mind. A custard filling this wet does best with a hot start, roughly 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then 350F for another 35-45 minutes until the center barely trembles.
- "Until firm in center"Take this loosely. An egg-and-cream filling baked until genuinely firm all the way to the middle will be overcooked and weeping by the time it cools. Pull it when the outer two inches are set and the center still wobbles as a unit; it finishes on the counter.
- "Grated ring"A typesetting slip for grated rind. Use the zest of one lemon, taking only the yellow and none of the white pith.
- Thin creamPeriod 'thin cream' is roughly today's light or single cream, about 18-20 percent fat. Light cream is the closest match; half-and-half is thinner but will serve. Heavy cream will make the filling dense and slightly greasy alongside the melted shortening.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotion, so the shortening is named at every turn. Any solid vegetable shortening works in the pastry, and the two tablespoons melted into the filling can be melted butter, which tastes better here.
- The appleTwo cups grated apple is roughly two to three medium firm-tart apples on the coarse side of a box grater. Grate them last and toss with the lemon juice at once, or they will brown while you assemble the rest.
- SugarA cup and a half against two cups of apple is very sweet by current taste. One cup is ample with a tart apple and still sets properly, since the eggs and not the sugar do the setting.
- Lattice over custardLay the strips on gently and do not press them into the filling, or they sink. Set the pie on a rimmed sheet before it goes in; liquid custard in a lined plate spills easily on the way to the oven.
- YieldThe original calls only for a large pie plate; a 9- or 10-inch pie, six to eight servings. Cool completely before cutting or the slices slump.
This comes from one of the cookery books Procter & Gamble commissioned after Crisco was introduced in 1911, when hydrogenated vegetable shortening was a genuinely new product and had to be argued into American kitchens that ran on lard and butter. That explains the brand name appearing twice in these few lines, including in a custard filling where a plain recipe would simply say melted butter. The dish itself is older than the shortening: grated-apple custard tarts sharpened with lemon sit in a long tradition of English and American "apple custards" and lemon tarts, in which fruit is bound with eggs and cream rather than piled up whole in slices.