Mary Pickford
HARTSDOK
PHOTO
L.RASE
RASPBERRY JAM TARTS
¼ lb. pot cheese or cream cheese ¼ lb. butter I ¼ lb. Flour Mix into a dough then cut into very thin squares.
Fill the center of each square with raspberry jam and then turn up the corners in envelope fashion.
Bake in a moderate oven until nicely browned.
These are so simple to make that I often do them myself. 18 Sincerely f Willesin Elliott 1916
WHIP
Boil one pound of prunes until soft and remove the pits.
Cut them in small pieces and mix with a cup of walnut meats and the beaten white of an egg.
Bake for about ten minutes and serve with whipped cream.
I confess that I do not know how to cook this myself, but I am very fond of it.
Two short entries: a cream-cheese pastry folded around jam, and a baked prune-and-nut whip. Both are written in the shorthand of a cook who assumes you already know what a pastry dough should feel like.
- The quantitiesThe tart dough is equal weights of cheese, butter and flour — a quarter pound, or 4 oz, of each. That is one stick of butter, 4 oz of cheese, and a scant cup of flour (flour weighs less per cup than butter, so measure by weight if you can).
- Pot cheese is not cream cheesePot cheese was a fresh, dry-curd cheese, drier and tangier than the block cream cheese sold today. Farmer cheese or well-drained dry curd cottage cheese gives the closer result; full-fat block cream cheese works but yields a softer, richer dough that needs more chilling.
- Chill the dough — this is the hingeWith no liquid, no sugar and no leavening, the dough holds together on fat alone and turns sticky and unrollable at room temperature. Mix it, press it flat, and refrigerate at least an hour before rolling; roll on a well-floured surface and work quickly.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350°F. The tarts want 20 to 25 minutes, until the edges are set and lightly coloured.
- Jam and foldingUse no more than half a teaspoon of thick jam per square, on 2-inch squares. Loose jam boils out; damp corners pressed firmly at the centre hold better than dry ones. The recipe gives no square size and no yield.
- The prune whip is under-specifiedNo sugar, no dish, no oven temperature is given. One egg white will barely bind a pound of chopped prunes and a cup of nuts, so the result is a dense baked mound rather than the airy whip the name suggests. Ten minutes at 350°F sets the white and warms it through; longer dries it out.
- Prunes todayA pound of pitted dried prunes is the ordinary supermarket bag. Simmer in water just to cover, 15 to 20 minutes, until they collapse, then drain well — wet prunes will not hold a shape.
Celebrity recipe collections of the 1910s were as much publicity as cookery, and the contributions were chosen to match the persona. Pickford, who by 1916 commanded a salary no actress had ever seen and negotiated her own contracts, offered jam tarts and the assurance that she made them herself; the same modest, domestic note runs through her screen roles of those years. The pastry itself is older than the book and wider than Hollywood: a rich dough folded around fruit preserve is the basic construction of the Central and Eastern European kolache and of rugelach, though traditional versions of both used yeast, sour cream or fresh curd, and the cream cheese formulation appears to be largely an American development, spread through home baking by way of immigrant kitchens and, it is often said, printed recipe cards from cream cheese manufacturers. Prune whip belongs to the same period's fondness for dried fruit desserts, cheap and available year-round before home freezing.