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Snowden Tart
1 cup cornstarch 2 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup white sugar ½ cup lard or butter 2 eggs 1 teaspoon baking powder Stewed apricots Mix thoroughly cornstarch, flour, sugar and baking powder. Separate yolks of eggs, beat well, mix with other ingredients, adding milk to make soft dough. Roll about ⅛ inch thick on floured board.
Line pie plates, putting in crusts of bread or raw rice to keep in shape. Bake in moderate oven.
Meanwhile, beat up the whites of eggs to a stiff froth with a little sugar. Take out crusts and fill with stewed apricots.
Then fill in roughly the beaten whites on top of fruit. Return to oven for a minute or two to set.
A rich, cookie-like tart shell rather than a flaky pastry, blind-baked and finished with apricots and a quick meringue. The written method has one clear omission and one open variable, both worth settling before you start.
- The fat is never mentioned againThe ½ cup of lard or butter is listed but dropped from the instructions. Cut it into the dry ingredients before the yolks and milk go in, as for any short pastry.
- How much milkNone is specified. Add it a tablespoon at a time after the yolks until the dough just holds together as a soft, rollable mass — roughly 3 to 5 tablespoons for this quantity, depending on the flour.
- Moderate ovenBy the conventions of the period this is roughly 350-375°F; the recipe gives no temperature or time. The shell is done when it is dry, firm and pale gold at the edges.
- Half cornstarch doughCornstarch-heavy dough -- One cup of cornstarch to two of flour (a third of the dry mixture) makes a very tender, crumbly, almost shortbread shell. It will not stretch; patch tears with scraps rather than re-rolling, and chill the dough if it softens.
- Blind baking with bread crustsThe crusts or raw rice are pie weights. Line the shell with parchment first, or the rice will embed itself in this soft dough. Remove weights for the last few minutes if you want the base fully dry.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. Ordinary unbleached all-purpose flour is the right substitute.
- Stewed apricotsDried apricots simmered until soft and thick, or fresh ones cooked down with sugar. Drain them well — a wet filling will soften the shell within the hour.
- The meringue"A little sugar" is vague; allow about 2 tablespoons per egg white for a meringue that holds. "A minute or two" only sets the surface. Two to three minutes at 400°F, or a brief pass under the broiler, gives colour without weeping.
- YieldEnough dough for two 8- or 9-inch shallow pie plates, or six to eight individual tart tins. Serve the day it is made.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to promote its flour, and much of its content came from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — which is why the book is full of dishes carrying family or place names with no explanation attached. Snowdon is a district of Montreal, but the name could as easily be a family one, so the attribution here is anyone's guess. What the recipe does show clearly is the early twentieth-century enthusiasm for cornstarch, which was heavily marketed for baking and gives this shell its distinctive short, sandy crumb. The apricot-and-meringue finish reflects the same era's reliance on dried fruit: imported dried apricots were a pantry staple in Canadian kitchens long before fresh ones were reliably available, and stewing them was the standard route to a tart filling out of season.