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August 8
Menu: Clam Cocktail; Roast Lamb, Mint Jelly; Rice Fritters; Lima Beans; Lettuce and Banana Salad; Windsor Tartlets; Iced Coffee Windsor Tartlets-Crisco Plain Pastry, 2 eggs, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons sugar, 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch, 5 powdered macaroons, 18 glace cherries, 1 piece of lemon peel, and 1/2 tablespoon chopped almonds. Put Crisco and sugar into 1 basin and beat them to a cream. Add yolks of eggs, 1 at a time, and beat each well in. Chop cherries and peel, add them and macaroons to mixture, mix thoroughly, add almonds and cornstarch. Roll out Crisco Plain Pastry and line small tartlet tins thinly with it. Beat whites of eggs to stiff froth and stir lightly into mixture. Fill each lined tin three parts full. Bake them in moderate oven until mixture is set and brown. Dust with sugar and serve either hot or cold. Place crossbars of pastry over mixture, if liked. Stale cakecrumbs can be used instead of macaroons.
A rich almond-and-cherry filling baked in pastry shells, from the promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble published to teach cooks what to do with its new vegetable shortening. The one thing that decides the outcome is how you treat the beaten whites: fold them in at the very end with a light hand, or the filling bakes dense instead of setting to a soft sponge.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. The tartlets are done when the filling is set through and lightly browned on top, roughly 20 to 25 minutes in small tins.
- CriscoPlain hydrogenated vegetable shortening, which is still sold under the same name though it has been reformulated more than once to cut trans fats. If your shortening is soft, chill it before creaming with the sugar, and keep the pastry fat cold.
- "1 basin"A mixing bowl. Edwardian and British-influenced recipes count basins the way we count bowls, and the instruction is only telling you to cream the fat and sugar separately from the whites.
- The cornstarch measure"1/2 tablespoons cornstarch" is a typesetting error somewhere between half a tablespoon and one and a half. Half a tablespoon is consistent with the quantity of egg and fat here and is the safer reading; it is there to steady the filling, not to thicken it.
- MacaroonsNot soft coconut macaroons. These are dry almond macaroons of the amaretti type, crushed to powder. Crisp amaretti or plain dry biscuit crumbs work; the recipe itself offers stale cake crumbs as the substitute.
- Lemon peel"1 piece of lemon peel" in this context means candied peel, chopped fine along with the cherries. If you use fresh zest instead, a teaspoon is plenty, since fresh peel brings none of the sugar the candied kind contributes.
- Glace cherriesEighteen candied cherries, chopped. Rinse off the heavy syrup of modern glace cherries and pat them dry or they will sink and weep into the pastry.
- Filling the tinsThree parts full is deliberate: the whites make the mixture rise. Overfilled tins spill and the tartlets are hard to release.
- YieldProbably somewhere around 18 small tartlets, though the recipe gives no yield. Serve them the day they are baked; the pastry softens overnight.
This page belongs to The Story of Crisco, the 1913 collection written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to persuade American cooks that a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could stand in for both butter and lard. Neil, a British-trained cookery writer who had edited domestic pages in Philadelphia, filled the book with recipes of visibly English character, and Windsor tartlets are one of them: the name appears to follow the Victorian and Edwardian habit of attaching a royal or aristocratic place-name to a small rich pastry, in the same family as Balmoral cakes and Richmond maids of honour, and no specific origin for the recipe is documented. The dated heading places the page in the book's calendar of dinners, which paired dated menus with the recipes that made them up. The mismatch between the page heading and the recipe printed under it is presumably an artifact of that dense dated layout, though the cause is not documented.