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Preserves Pastry
Cream Crisco an sugar, then add eggs well beaten, flour, salt, baking powder, and extract. Line twelve tartlet tins with pastry, put teaspoonful of preserves in each, then divide mixture into them, and bake in moderately hot oven twenty minutes.
Sufficient for twelve tartlets.
This is the method half of a jam tartlet with a creamed sponge topping; the ingredient quantities belong to a separate list that does not travel with the text. Read it as a technique rather than a full formula.
- Missing quantitiesNothing in the passage tells you how much Crisco, sugar, flour or egg to use, and the amounts cannot honestly be reconstructed from the wording. A creamed sponge batter built on roughly a cup of flour would be about the right volume for twelve tartlets, but that is a guess, not something the text supports.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911. Modern Crisco is reformulated but behaves much the same in creaming; butter gives more flavour and slightly less lift.
- "Moderately hot oven"Conventionally read today as somewhere around 375-400F, though the book gives no figure. Twenty minutes suits shallow tins; the tops should spring back and the pastry edges be pale gold.
- Tartlet tinsIndividual shallow patty tins, roughly 2 1/2 inches across. A 12-cup standard muffin pan works but makes a deeper, more cake-like tart that will need a little longer in the oven.
- "Extract"Unspecified in the text. Vanilla is the usual default; lemon or almond would suit the jam, at perhaps half a teaspoon for a twelve-tart batch.
- Jam under batterKeep to the stated teaspoonful. Preserves boil and expand in the oven, and a heavier spoonful will push up through the sponge and weld the tart to the tin.
- Blind bakingNot called for, and not needed at this size, but chill the lined tins before filling so the pastry sets before the batter softens it.
- YieldTwelve small tarts, best the day they are baked; the pastry softens overnight under the jam.
Procter & Gamble promoted Crisco after its 1911 launch with cookbooks specifying the new hydrogenated shortening where lard or butter would once have stood, which accounts for the branded ingredient here. The dish itself is much older than the shortening: a spoonful of preserve under a creamed sponge topping in a pastry case is the familiar English jam-and-sponge tartlet, a fixture of Victorian and Edwardian tea tables, and a close relative of the Bakewell tart, which uses a ground-almond mixture in the same position.