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Tart Paste (Eggless)
3 cups Five Roses flour ⅔ cup lard 1 tablespoon sugar 1 cup milk ½ teaspoon cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda Pinch of salt.
An ingredient list rather than a method, in the shorthand style of milling-company cookbooks that assumed the reader already knew how pastry was made. Two things need attention before you mix: the leavening proportions and the absence of any handling instructions.
- The leavening looks reversedStandard homemade baking powder is two parts cream of tartar to one part soda; here the soda is doubled instead. As printed this will leave a soapy, faintly metallic taste and yellowish patches. Treat the proportions as suspect and use about 1½ teaspoons of commercial baking powder in place of both, or reverse them (1 teaspoon cream of tartar to ½ teaspoon soda).
- Method, since none is givenSift the flour with sugar, salt and leavening, cut in the lard until it is the size of small peas, then add the milk in stages to make a soft dough. Handle it as little as possible, rest it cold for half an hour, and roll thin.
- Milk, not ice waterThe milk gives body and colour where a richer paste would rely on eggs, though the recipe itself says nothing about the substitution. It makes a softer dough than a water pastry and browns faster, so the edges can catch.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour, stronger than most modern American all-purpose. Any standard all-purpose works; if yours is soft or Southern-style, expect a more crumbly, less resilient paste.
- LardUse rendered leaf lard if you can get it, not hydrogenated shelf-stable block lard, which behaves differently and tastes flatter. Chill it hard before cutting in. Shortening substitutes one-for-one; butter will need slightly less milk.
- OvenThe recipe gives no baking instruction at all. Shells of this kind are normally baked hot, around 425F, for 12 to 15 minutes until set and lightly coloured; too slow an oven can let the fat leak before the flour sets.
- YieldSomething close to 1 3/4 lb of dough, enough for roughly two dozen small tart shells or two 9-inch crusts.
- What it is forA chemically leavened paste, closer to a rich biscuit dough than to flaky puff pastry. It suits jam tarts, butter tarts and covered patties, where a sturdy shell matters more than layers.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, part of a long tradition of milling and grocery firms giving away recipe collections built around a single branded product. Eggless pastry recipes like this one turn up throughout early twentieth-century North American cookbooks: eggs were seasonal and expensive, and a paste raised with soda and cream of tartar plus milk could stand in for a richer dough at a fraction of the cost. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing is the older home method of making baking powder, and it went on being printed decades after packaged powders had become common.