Sweet Pastry Dough No. 2

A rich, lemon-scented pâte sucrée in the old proportions: half as much fat as flour, bound with yolks rather than whole egg. The recipe assumes you know how to bake a tart shell, so the numbers it omits matter more than the ones it gives.

• Keep everything coldThe hinge of the recipe is the chill. With a cup of shortening to two cups of flour this dough is very soft, and it will tear and shrink if rolled warm. Give it at least an hour in the refrigerator, and rest the rolled shells again before baking.
• Shortening"Shortening" in American recipes of this era usually means a solid fat, lard or hydrogenated vegetable fat; the word was sometimes used loosely for any fat that shortens, so butter is not strictly excluded. Modern shortening behaves similarly but is blander; butter gives better flavour with the lemon, though it makes a slightly more fragile dough.
• Flour measureTwo cups of all-purpose flour is roughly 240-250 g unsifted, less if sifted first, which many recipes of the period assumed. If the dough feels sticky after the water goes in, hold back a spoonful or two of the liquid rather than adding more flour.
• Lemon rindRind here means the zest only, finely grated, with none of the white pith. One lemon yields far more juice than this quantity of dough needs; start with a tablespoon and add more only if the dough is dry.
• Mixing orderCut the shortening into the flour and sugar first, then add the beaten yolk-and-water mixture and the lemon. Work it just until it coheres; sugar-enriched doughs toughen quickly if kneaded.
• Oven temperatureNone is given. Blind-bake tart shells at 375F for 12-15 minutes, until the edges are set and pale gold. Sugar in the dough means it colours fast, so watch the last few minutes.
• Yield and pan sizeTen shells suggests small tartlet tins, though the recipe does not say what size. The batch runs to something over a pound of dough, so it will line two 9-inch tart pans rather than one; scale down if you want a single large shell.