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Cherry Tarts
1 1/2 cups flour 3/4 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 6 tablespoons shortening 1/3 cup cold water Sift dry ingredients together; rub in shortening very lightly with fingertips; add water slowly, just enough to make stiff dough; roll out very thin on floured board and line patty pans, being very careful to have pastry come well over the edges of pans. Bake in hot oven about 12 or 15 minutes. Cover with syrup made as for strawberry pie using 1/2 cup juice from the cherries instead of strawberries. Cook over hot fire, stirring constantly for a minute or two. Remove from fire and beat hard. Return to slow fire, cook slowly until thick, and pour while hot over cherries which have been put into patty shells. Other fruit can be used in place of cherries.
A baking-powder short crust baked blind in small tins, then filled with fruit and a thickened glaze. The recipe is written for a reader who already has the strawberry pie page in front of her, so one part of it is incomplete.
- The missing syrupThe glaze is only described by cross-reference to the strawberry pie recipe, which is not on this page. A cooked fruit glaze of this type is normally juice, sugar and a starch or egg thickener in stated proportions; without that recipe the quantities here are genuinely unknown, so use a glaze recipe you can measure.
- Patty pansSmall individual tart tins; a 12-cup muffin tin is a reasonable modern stand-in, though patty pans were often shallower. Bringing the pastry well over the edges, as instructed, presumably helps stop the shells slipping down as they bake.
- Hot ovenNo temperature is given; 'hot' in this period is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. Twelve to fifteen minutes at that heat should colour and set the thin shells.
- Baking-powder pastryThree teaspoons of baking powder in 1 1/2 cups of flour is deliberate, not a misprint for a cake. It puffs and tenderises a crust made with relatively little fat, but the dough turns tough quickly, so mix it to a stiff mass and stop.
- ShorteningIn this period the word means a solid fat, vegetable shortening or lard. Modern shortening behaves much the same; butter gives better flavour but needs to be very cold and will brown faster.
- Weight the shellsThe recipe says nothing about this. If the empty shells balloon, prick the bases and line them with paper and beans, or a second small tin, for the first part of the bake, then finish uncovered.
- Slow fireLow heat. The sequence of boiling briefly, beating hard off the heat, then cooking slowly is there to get a clear glaze without lumps; a starch glaze held on high heat after thickening will thin out again.
- Yield and timingNo yield is given; 1 1/2 cups of flour rolled very thin should make roughly a dozen small shells, depending on the tins. Fill and glaze shortly before serving, as the moist fruit will soften a baking-powder crust.
This comes from one of the cookbooks issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which for decades printed free recipe booklets in which its own product appeared in nearly every formula, pastry included. The small filled "patty" shells take their name from an older English term for a little pie. The closing line -- other fruit can be used -- fits the way these booklets cross-reference one recipe to another, as the syrup instruction here does.