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Pastry Fingers
Sift 1/2 cup pastry flour, 2 cups entire wheat flour, and 1 teaspoon salt into basin, add 3 tablespoons Crisco, and 1/2 cup butter, cut them into flours with knife until finely divided. Then rub in fine with finger tips and make into stiff paste with cold water. Roll out 1/4 inch in thickness, cut in finger shape pieces, lay on Criscoed tins and bake from 7 to 10 minutes in hot oven. Cool, brush over with slightly beaten egg white, and sprinkle with salted pine nuts. Return to oven to brown nut meats.
A savoury cracker-stick rather than a sweet biscuit — essentially a whole-wheat short pastry cut in strips, glazed and studded with pine nuts. It is meant as an accompaniment to eggs or a salad course, not a dessert.
- The hinge: keep everything coldWith 3 tablespoons shortening plus 1/2 cup butter to 2 1/2 cups flour, this is a rich short paste that turns greasy if the fat softens. Cut the fat in cold, add only enough ice water to bring it together, and chill the dough before rolling if the kitchen is warm.
- Entire wheat flourThis is whole wheat flour, finely milled. It absorbs more water than white flour, so the "stiff paste" may take a tablespoon or two more cold water than you expect.
- Pastry flourA soft, low-protein white flour. All-purpose works, or approximate pastry flour with a mix of all-purpose and a spoonful of cornstarch.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotion, hence the branding. Any solid vegetable shortening or lard does the same job.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a period "hot oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 425-450°F. Watch closely -- at 1/4 inch thick these colour fast, and the stated 7 to 10 minutes is about right at that heat.
- Basin and Criscoed tinsA mixing bowl and greased flat baking sheets. Parchment is easier and needs no fat at all.
- The second bakeCool the fingers, brush with lightly beaten egg white, scatter the nuts and return them to the oven only until the pine nuts turn golden — two to four minutes. Pine nuts hold a great deal of oil and go bitter the moment they scorch.
- Salted pine nutsThis probably means nuts fried in fat and salted, as period "salted nuts" usually were. Toasting them dry in a pan with a pinch of salt before they go on is sufficient, since they get a further turn in the oven.
- YieldRoughly three to four dozen fingers about 3 inches long, depending on how you cut them. They keep a week in a tin and crisp again in a low oven.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the manufacturer's menu book, written by a professional cookery author and given away or sold cheaply to teach households a new product. Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, was hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a cleaner and cheaper stand-in for lard, and books like this one worked it into every pastry, cake and fried dish they could. Pastry fingers are a simple, unbranded thing — strips of pastry finished with cheese, seeds or nuts to serve alongside eggs, soup or salad in place of bread. The whole-wheat flour and pine nuts here reflect the period's interest in "entire wheat" as a wholesome grain, promoted in American domestic-science circles in the decades before the book appeared.