Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Maids of Honor
Maids of Honor
Crisco puff pastry, 4 tablespoons sugar, 1 tablespoon ground almonds, 2 eggs, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, 4 tablespoons melted Crisco, and 1 tablespoon cocoanut. Roll out Crisco puff pastry and line 8 gem pans with it. Put eggs and sugar into basin, and beat them together for 15 minutes; then stir in lightly Crisco, ground almonds, cocoanut, and vanilla. Put 3 teaspoons into each gem pan and bake in a moderate oven for 20 minutes. When cooked, sprinkle over with little sugar.
A shortening-era version of the English Maid of Honour tart, with an almond-coconut filling in place of the usual curd. It is straightforward once a few of the terms are translated.
- Gem pansGem pans are the cast-iron or tin muffin trays of the period, with cups a little smaller and shallower than a modern muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; line eight cups and leave the rest empty, or use a shallow tartlet tray.
- Moderate ovenIn this period 'moderate' covers roughly 350-375F; 350F is a safe reading. At 20 minutes the filling should be set and lightly domed, with the pastry edges coloured.
- CriscoCrisco was new hydrogenated vegetable shortening when this book was written, and the book exists to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter gives better flavour in both the pastry and the filling.
- The 15-minute beatingEggs and sugar were beaten by hand for a quarter of an hour to build volume, since there is no chemical leavening here. In a stand mixer with the whisk, 4 to 6 minutes on high gets you to the same pale, thick, ribboning stage.
- Folding in the fatLet the melted shortening cool to barely warm before it goes in, and fold rather than stir. Hot fat dropped into the beaten eggs will collapse the foam and the tarts will bake flat and dense.
- CocoanutThe old spelling of coconut; here it means dried desiccated coconut, not the sweetened flaked kind sold today. Sweetened flake will work but push the tarts noticeably sweeter.
- Filling quantityThree teaspoons per cup is about half a fluid ounce, which puts only a shallow layer in each lined gem cup. Do not overfill; the mixture rises as it bakes and sinks again as it cools.
- Yield and servingEight small tarts. Sugar is dusted on while they are still warm so it clings, and they are best the day they are made, once the pastry has crisped.
Maids of Honour are the tarts of Richmond upon Thames, small curd-cheese pastries sold for centuries near Richmond Green and still made there; the name is generally traced by tradition to Henry VIII and the ladies of the court at Richmond Palace, a story often repeated but not documented. The classic filling is milk curd with lemon and almonds, and this version keeps the almonds while replacing the curd with a beaten egg-and-sugar mixture stretched with coconut, which was cheap and fashionable in early twentieth-century American baking. That it appears in a promotional volume for a new hydrogenated shortening tells you as much about the book as the dish: an English teatime name lends a homely recipe some prestige, and the pastry becomes another demonstration that the tin of Crisco can do what butter and lard did.