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Apricot Tarts
Apricot jam or jelly. 2 cupfuls flour 1/2 cupful Crisco 4 tablespoonfuls sugar ½ teaspoonful salt 1 egg 2 teaspoonfuls vanilla extract 1 teaspoonful baking powder Apricot jam o jelly Whipped cream Preserved cherries.
This entry gives only the ingredient list — the method has dropped out — so what follows is mostly about reading the proportions correctly and filling the gap with standard sweet-pastry practice.
- No method givenThe page is an ingredient list only; the mixing and baking directions are missing from this printing. Treated as what it is, a sweet shortcrust: cut the shortening into the dry ingredients, bind with the beaten egg and vanilla, chill, roll thin, line small tins.
- The saltThe printed page gives half a teaspoonful of salt against the two cups of flour, which is what our text now reads. That is the right amount for a dessert pastry.
- "jam o jelly"A typesetting slip for "jam or jelly." Either works, though a stiff jam holds its shape better in a baked shell than a soft jelly.
- Crisco then and nowIn 1913 Crisco was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, firmer and more waxy than the soybean-and-palm blend sold under the name today. Modern shortening behaves the same way in pastry; chilled unsalted butter will give better flavour at the cost of a slightly less tender crumb.
- OvenThe printing gives no baking direction. Small tart shells of this kind are normally baked hot, around 400F, for 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges are pale gold; a cooler oven lets the fat melt out before the flour sets.
- Filling and creamBake the shells empty, or with the jam already in; both approaches were in use. The whipped cream goes on only after the tarts are fully cool, or it collapses.
- YieldTwo cups of flour gives roughly a dozen tarts in 2½-inch tins, or eight in a standard muffin pan.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, two years after the company introduced Crisco as the first widely marketed all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening. The book's purpose was to persuade cooks that a cottonseed-oil product could stand in for lard and butter in everything they already made, so its pastry chapter is deliberately conventional: apricot tarts, filled with jam and finished with cream, would have been familiar from any late-Victorian household manual. What the book was selling was not the tart but the fat, and the recipes are best read as demonstrations. Promotional cookbooks of this type were a standard advertising form in the period, and they did much to establish shortening as the default American pastry fat for the next half-century.