Paste
5 cupfuls flour 1 1/2 cupfuls Crisco 1/3 cupful ground almonds 1 cupful sugar 2 eggs 2 yolks of eggs 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls salt Water Sift flour and almonds into basin, rub Crisco into them, add salt, sugar, eggs well beaten and water to make stiff paste. Leave in cool place two hours, then roll out and use for pies and tartlets.
Sufficient for four pies.
A rich sweet almond shortcrust from a Crisco promotional cookbook, scaled for a household that baked four pies at a sitting. It handles more like a cookie dough than a flaky pastry.
- The hinge: chill and patch, don't stretchWith this much sugar, egg and fat, the dough is short and crumbly rather than elastic. The two hours in a cool place are not optional — warm dough tears and slumps in the tin. Press any cracks together with your fingers instead of pulling the sheet to fit.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name though reformulated over the years to remove trans fats. One and a half cupfuls is about 285 g. Modern shortening or an equal weight of chilled butter both work; butter gives more flavour and a slightly firmer dough.
- Water is unmeasured on purposeThe original gives none, because flour absorbency varied. Expect roughly 4 to 8 tablespoons of ice water for this quantity, added a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres. Stop as soon as it holds together in your hand.
- BasinA mixing bowl. "Rub Crisco into them" means working the fat into the flour with your fingertips until it resembles coarse meal, exactly as for any rubbed-in pastry.
- Ground almondsA third of a cupful is about 35 g of almond meal or almond flour. It adds fat and richness and helps keep a fruit filling from soaking the base; it will not replace flour by weight, so measure it as an addition.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A sweet almond crust of this kind is usually baked in a moderate oven, around 350-375F; blind-bake shells about 15 minutes with weights, then 5 to 10 more uncovered. The sugar browns quickly, so check early.
- YieldRoughly 1.3 kg of dough — four 9-inch single crusts, or two double-crust pies, or about three dozen tartlets. It freezes well, wrapped tight, for a couple of months.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the early twentieth century: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, arrived in kitchens that thought in terms of lard and butter, and the accompanying recipe books — written by Marion Harris Neil — systematically rewrote the standard repertoire with the new fat substituted in. This paste is a case in point: a conventional sweet almond shortcrust of a sort familiar from English and American pastry books, with shortening where the older versions would have said butter. The habit of making enough for four pies at once may suggest a household that baked on a schedule rather than on impulse, and the instruction to leave the dough in a cool place, rather than a refrigerator, is at least suggestive of the equipment such a kitchen was assumed to have.