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Apricot and Cheese Turnovers
2 packages cream cheese 1/2 cup shortening 2 cups flour 3 1/2 cups apricots salt Cream cheese with shortening, add flour and salt and work into a dough. Set in refrigerator over night. In morning, roll out quite thin, cut into 2-inch squares. Place apricots in center, pinch four corners together, place in ungreased pans and bake in oven (450 degrees) until brown.
A cream cheese pastry — the same dough sold today as cream cheese pie crust or rugelach dough — wrapped around apricots and baked hot. Two things decide the outcome: the overnight chill and the amount of fruit you can actually enclose in a two-inch square.
- "2 packages cream cheese"Cream cheese was commonly sold in 3-ounce packages for much of the twentieth century, so two packages probably means about 6 ounces, though the recipe does not say. If you buy the standard 8-ounce brick, either use about three-quarters of it or scale the flour and shortening up by a third.
- ShorteningMost likely vegetable shortening or lard. Butter works in the same quantity, though the dough will be firmer straight from the refrigerator and needs a few minutes on the counter before rolling.
- The overnight rest is not optionalCream cheese dough is slack and sticky when freshly mixed and will tear rather than roll. A full night at refrigerator temperature hydrates the flour and firms the fat enough to roll thin without flour-flooding the board.
- The fruit quantity is out of proportionThe fruit quantity looks out of proportion -- Two cups of flour with about 6 ounces of cheese, rolled thin, gives on the order of three to four dozen two-inch squares, each holding a teaspoon or so of fruit -- well short of 3 1/2 cups in all. Expect apricots left over, and fill to what the squares will close over.
- Which apricotsFresh apricots in small dice, thick apricot preserve, or dried apricots stewed until soft and drained all work. Anything wet and loose will steam the pastry open at the seams, so drain well and do not use canned halves in syrup as they are.
- SaltNo amount is given. A quarter teaspoon in two cups of flour is right for a dough with unsalted fat; halve it if your butter or shortening is salted.
- 450 degrees is correct but briefThe high heat sets the pastry before the cheese fat can weep out. Expect 12 to 15 minutes, and watch from ten — the corners brown fast and the sugar in the fruit will catch if any escapes.
- SealingPinching the four corners together in the middle leaves four open seams, which let steam out. Press the corners firmly onto the fruit, not just against each other, or they spring apart in the oven.
- YieldRoughly three dozen small turnovers, depending how thin you roll. They are best within a few hours of baking; the pastry softens by the next day.
The dough -- roughly three parts flour to one part each cream cheese and shortening, with no sugar and no liquid -- is close kin to the pastry used for Eastern European rugelach and kolache, and versions of it appear in American cookbooks under various names for turnovers and tarts. Packaged cream cheese put the dough within easy reach of home cooks, and a dough mixed at night, chilled while you slept and cut into squares in the morning suited an efficiency-minded kitchen.