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Windsor Tartlets
Crisco Plain Pastry, 2 eggs, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons sugar, 1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch, 5 powdered macaroons, 18 glace cherries, 1 piece of lemon peel, and 1/2 tablespoon chopped almonds.
Put Crisco and sugar into 1 basin and beat them to a cream. Add yolks of eggs, 1 at a time, and beat each well in. Chop cherries and peel, add them and macaroons to mixture, mix thoroughly, add almonds and cornstarch. Roll out Crisco Plain Pastry and line small tartlet tins thinly with it. Beat whites of eggs to stiff froth and stir lightly into mixture. Fill each lined tin three parts full. Bake them in moderate oven until mixture is set and brown. Dust with sugar and serve either hot or cold. Place crossbars of pastry over mixture, if liked. Stale cakecrumbs can be used instead of macaroons.
A creamed almond-and-cherry filling baked in pastry shells, of a type that sits between a frangipane tart and a Bakewell. Two details govern the result: the macaroons must be the crisp almond sort, and the beaten whites go in at the very last moment.
- CriscoThis book was published to promote Crisco, so the shortening is named in every line. In the filling use 4 tablespoons (2 oz) of butter for better flavour; for the pastry, any all-purpose shortening or a butter/shortening mix works as written.
- Moderate oven350F. Small tartlets set and colour in about 18-22 minutes; the filling should be puffed and lightly browned and no longer wet in the centre.
- MacaroonsThe almond sort is what suits this filling — Italian amaretti or a plain almond macaroon — dried and crushed to a coarse powder, rather than a coconut macaroon. Five of them give roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup of crumbs. The stated substitute, stale cake crumbs, works but gives a blander, softer filling.
- The lemon peel"1 piece of lemon peel" almost certainly means candied peel, chopped fine along with the cherries, not fresh zest. A tablespoon or so of chopped candied peel is the right order of quantity; if you use fresh zest instead, use the zest of half a lemon and expect a sharper, less confectionery result.
- Order of operationsCream fat and sugar, beat in the yolks one at a time, then fold in the fruit, crumbs, almonds and cornstarch. The whites go in last, folded lightly — beat them only to a soft-stiff froth, since an over-beaten meringue folded into a heavy creamed base breaks down and the tartlets bake flat.
- Lining the tins"Thinly" is the instruction that matters. Roll the pastry to about 1/8 inch; a thick shell in a small tin will still be raw under the filling when the top has browned. No blind baking is needed at this thickness.
- Filling levelThree parts full is deliberate — the whites make the mixture rise. Fill higher and it spills over the rims and sticks the tartlets into the tins.
- YieldRoughly enough filling for 12 to 18 tartlets in 2- to 2 1/2-inch tins, depending on depth. Dust with caster or icing sugar once the tops have stopped steaming.
The recipe comes from one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned after introducing Crisco in 1911 — books arranged as day-by-day menus, in which pastry, cake and fried dishes call for the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening by name, so that a cook working through the calendar would use it constantly. The tartlet itself is older and English: a creamed butter-and-egg filling enriched with crushed almond macaroons, candied peel and glace cherries, close kin to the cheesecakes and "puddings in pastry" of nineteenth-century English cookery, with optional pastry crossbars over the top in the manner of a Bakewell or a Manchester tart. The Windsor name attaches to a whole family of Victorian and Edwardian dishes — Windsor soup, Windsor pudding — and generally signals gentility rather than any documented royal connection.