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Rhubarb Fanchonettes
2 pounds rhubarb, 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup strained orange juice, 1 tablespoon powdered gelatine, 1 piece orange peel, 1 cup cream, whipped, flavored and sweetened, number of individual pastry shells.
Cut rhubarb into inch pieces. Hot house variety needs no peeling. Place in baking dish in layers, sprinkling sugar between layers. Add 2 tablespoons water, 1 tablespoon Crisco, and a few thin strips orange peel, place in moderate oven, cover and bake 1 hour. Dissolve gelatine in orange juice and when rhubarb is cooked remove it from oven and add this mixture to it. Let it get cold. When ready to serve fill shells with rhubarb mixture, heap with whipped cream and decorate with crystallized orange peel.
A cold rhubarb tart filling in individual shells, from a Crisco promotional cookbook. The only tricky part is the gelatine, which the original tells you to dissolve in cold juice.
- Moderate ovenA moderate oven is usually reckoned at roughly 350-375F; bake covered for the full hour. The rhubarb should collapse into a thick compote rather than a watery sauce.
- The gelatine stepPowdered gelatine will not dissolve in cold orange juice; it only swells. Sprinkle it over the 1/2 cup juice and let it stand five minutes, then stir the softened mass into the rhubarb while the fruit is still hot from the oven so it melts completely. Any undissolved grains will stay as rubbery specks.
- How firm it setsOne tablespoon of gelatine is about one and a third standard envelopes, and against 2 pounds of fruit it gives a soft, spoonable set, not a sliceable jelly. Chill at least 4 hours, and fill the shells only at the last moment or the pastry softens.
- CriscoThe tablespoon of shortening baked with the fruit is the sponsor's contribution and does little here; butter works as well, or leave it out.
- RhubarbForced or hothouse stalks are pink, slender and need no peeling, as the recipe says. Field rhubarb late in the season is coarser and more acid; string the outer skin and expect to want more sugar. Use only the stalks, never the leaves.
- Pastry shellsNo shell recipe is given. Bake them blind and fully, until dry and browned, in tartlet tins of about 3 inches; a single crust recipe makes eight to twelve.
- Orange peelThin strips of zest only, no white pith. The crystallized peel for the top has to be bought or candied in advance.
- YieldEnough filling for about ten to twelve small shells, or eight generous ones.
A fanchonette is a small filled tartlet, usually finished with meringue or cream, a name carried into English cookery from nineteenth-century French pastry work and said by the 1900s to have been used loosely for almost any individual tart with a soft filling. Its appearance in a book of this kind is more interesting than the pastry itself: A Calendar of Dinners was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced in 1911, and its recipes work the product into places it is barely needed, such as the lone tablespoon dropped over baking rhubarb here. Powdered gelatine in cup-and-spoon measure was itself a fairly recent convenience, replacing the calf's-foot stock and sheet isinglass of earlier kitchens, and forced rhubarb from heated glasshouses is often said to have been the first fresh fruit of the year in northern cities, which is why it turns up in a spring dessert rather than as a plain stewed compote.