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Tarts and Shells (Makes 15 Large Tarts or 2 Shells)
Into 1 large cup of Five Roses flour stir 1 teaspoon baking powder ½ cup butter and lard mixed. Fill cup up with boiling water and let stand. Beat stiff and dry white of 1 egg and put in the flour. Stir lightly. Add a little more flour (if needed) and roll as light and quickly as possible.
Bake in a hot oven. These tarts are best with lemon or cream filling.
Notes on Tarts-Bake pie shells on outside of pan bottom up, and see how nice and even they will be.
Always put the sugar used in a tart in the centre of the fruit, not on the top, or it will make the paste sodden.
DISCRIMINATING housewives have long since to be the best "all purpose" flour. For thickening soups and gravies, for rolling meats or dredging fruit, wherever flour comes into use, no matter how small the quantity, the fineness and uniform texture of Five Roses add class and quality.
A hot-water pastry lightened with beaten egg white — quick to mix, but it depends on being rolled and baked before the fat cools and the gluten tightens.
- The hinge: work fast and warmThe hinge: work fast at the rolling -- Boiling water melts the fat into the flour. The recipe has you let the mixture stand (long enough that the beaten white is not cooked when it goes in), but the rolling itself is to be done "as light and quickly as possible". Have the pans ready before you mix.
- The water quantity is ambiguous"Fill cup up with boiling water" most likely means topping the half-cup of fat up to a full cup, i.e. about ½ cup water poured over the butter and lard. It could also mean filling the flour cup. Add the water gradually and stop when the dough just holds together.
- "1 large cup"Cup measures were not yet standardised, so the size is uncertain. Read it as a generous 1 cup of flour (roughly 130-140 g) and expect to add the "little more flour" the recipe allows for.
- Butter and lard mixedThe recipe gives no proportion; equal parts (¼ cup each) is a reasonable reading, giving the flavour of butter with the shortness of lard. Modern lard is often firmer than the rendered pork fat of the period; vegetable shortening behaves similarly.
- Hot oven425–450°F. Tart shells this size need roughly 10–15 minutes; larger shells 15–20. Watch the edges rather than the clock, as hot-water pastry colours quickly.
- Baking shells over the panDraping the pastry over the *outside* of an inverted tin or muffin pan is a sound blind-baking trick — the shell cannot slump inward. Prick it well and expect to lift it off while still warm, before it sets to the metal.
- Sugar in the centre of the fruitGood advice and still true: sugar sitting on top of the fruit draws juice into the upper crust. Buried in the fruit it dissolves into the filling instead of soaking the paste.
- Yield and fillingFifteen large tarts or two shells; no shell diameter is given. Since the shells are baked empty, they suit the lemon or cream filling the recipe recommends, added after cooling.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg in the 1910s, and like most flour-company books it was assembled from recipes sent in by customers — which is why the instructions read like one cook talking to another rather than tested copy, and why the milling advertisement runs straight into the last paragraph, mid-sentence, where a line of type has evidently dropped out. The pastry itself belongs to the hot-water school, in which boiling liquid is poured over the fat instead of the fat being cut in cold; the technique is old in British baking, where it gives the sturdy raised crust of pork pies, and thrifty domestic versions of it circulated widely because it forgives warm hands and warm kitchens. The beaten egg white is aimed at puffing a crust that would otherwise be dense — stiffly whipped whites were often reached for in this period when something was wanted lighter.