Angelica
Preserved cherries Rub Crisco into flour, add salt, sugar, baking powder, break egg in and mix well with fork, then add vanilla. Roll out, cut with cutter and line Criscoed tartlet tins with the rounds. Line with paper and put in some rice or peas to keep paste from rising; bake in hot oven twenty minutes. Remove rice and papers. When pastries are cold put in each one a spoonful of the jam or jelly. Fill with whipped cream and decorate with cherries and angelica.
Sufficient for thirty tarts.
A blind-baked tartlet shell filled with jam and whipped cream, from the promotional cookbook that introduced American cooks to hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Note that the quantities have not survived onto this page — the fragment "Preserved cherries" is the tail end of an ingredient list that belongs above the method.
- The missing quantitiesAs printed here there are no measurements for the Crisco, flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, egg or vanilla. Any standard sweet short pastry will do; note that thirty tartlets is a large yield, and a batch built on about 2 cups flour to 2/3 cup shortening, 2 tablespoons sugar, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt and one egg will line rather fewer than thirty tins.
- CriscoModern Crisco is still a solid vegetable shortening but is no longer the partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil of 1913. Unsalted butter can be swapped in one for one for more flavour, though the shells will behave a little differently in the oven.
- Hot ovenA period "hot oven" is roughly 400-450F; take 425F as a working middle. Twenty minutes at that heat is on the long side for small shells - check at twelve to fifteen minutes, and expect the edges to colour before the base sets.
- Blind bakingPaper and rice or dried peas is exactly the technique still used, though ceramic beans or pie weights do it better. Remove the weights and paper for the last few minutes so the bases dry out rather than steaming.
- Criscoed tinsGreasing the tartlet tins is the hinge instruction here. A sweet, egg-rich paste sticks badly, and a cooled shell that will not release cannot be filled.
- AngelicaThe green decoration is candied stem of Angelica archangelica, once sold by every confectioner and now a specialist item. Candied citron peel tinted green, or a sliver of pistachio, stands in; do not attempt to candy stems from an unidentified wild umbellifer, since the family includes several dangerously toxic look-alikes.
- Assembly and timingFill only shortly before serving. Jam under whipped cream will weep into a baked shell within an hour or two, and thirty small tarts go soft quickly.
- YieldThirty tartlets, presumably in small tins, which suits a tea table rather than a dinner. Halve the pastry for a household batch.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale, and was written by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. Its job was to persuade cooks that a manufactured vegetable shortening could replace both lard and butter in every department of the kitchen, which is why the book runs through the whole repertoire of the period rather than confining itself to novelties. Tartlets of this kind — a blind-baked short shell, a spoonful of preserve, whipped cream, and a decoration of candied fruit and green angelica — were standard Edwardian tea fare, and the candied angelica is the period marker: the stems were a staple of the confectioner's shelf, with the trade generally traced to Niort in western France, and they supplied the green that no other kitchen ingredient could. That such a dish is titled "Angelica" here says less about the pastry than about how much the garnish mattered.