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Sugar Paste for Tartlets
1 cupful sugar 4 cupfuls flour1/2 cupful Crisco, generous measure 1/2 teaspoonful salt 3 eggs 1 lemon Sift flour on to baking board, make hole in center, and put in grated lemon rind, salt, sugar, eggs, and Crisco. Mix the whole to a stiff pastry. This paste is used for the bottom layer of pies and to line tartlet tins of various kinds. It is excellent for turnovers. Sufficient for thirty tartlets.
A sweet egg pastry of the pâte sucrée type, written for a book published to promote Crisco. It handles more like a cookie dough than a flaky crust, and the original assumes you know how to bake it, since no temperature or time is given.
- The hinge: do not overwork itBecause there is no liquid but the eggs, the temptation is to keep kneading until it comes together. Bring it just to a cohesive mass, press it into a disc, and rest it in the refrigerator 30 minutes or more. Worked warm and long, it bakes hard rather than short.
- Crisco, then and nowCrisco was a new product when this book appeared, and the original formula was hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Today's version has been reformulated and may not behave identically. Any solid vegetable shortening works; an equal weight of cold butter gives better flavour and a slightly more fragile crust.
- How to measure the flourFour cupfuls of flour to one of sugar, with only half a cupful of fat, is a lean ratio for a sweet paste, and modern cups packed straight from the bag will make it drier still. Reckon on somewhere around 1 lb (roughly 400-500 g) of flour, and hold back the last half cup until you see how the eggs go.
- If it will not come togetherEggs of the period may not have matched today's large grade, so three modern large eggs may be plenty; if the dough stays crumbly add cold water a teaspoon at a time rather than another egg, which will toughen it.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. For blind-baked tartlet shells, 375F is a reasonable modern setting: prick or line the shells, bake 12-15 minutes until pale gold. The sugar in the dough browns quickly, so watch the edges.
- Grated lemon rindTake only the yellow zest of one lemon; the white pith is bitter. Rub the zest into the sugar before mixing so the oils are distributed evenly through the dough.
- Yield and storageThirty small tartlet shells means about 2 lb of dough — enough for two 9-inch bottom crusts with a good deal left over. It keeps wrapped in the refrigerator three days, or frozen two months.
This paste comes from a Crisco-sponsored kitchen: A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in the mid-1910s, shortly after Crisco was introduced as a substitute for lard and butter, and the book's recipes are built around the new shortening. The paste itself is much older than the fat — a sugared, egg-bound short pastry of the kind French confectioners call pâte sucrée, mixed by the classic well method with the flour heaped on the board and the wet ingredients dropped into a hollow in the middle. The instruction is to sift the flour onto a bare baking board, not into a bowl — a technique of long standing rather than a reliable marker of the period. Tartlet tins "of various kinds" were standard equipment in a household that expected to put out a plate of small sweets, and a single batch is scaled to thirty of them.