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Crisco (Teaspoonful salt Roll pastry)
1 cupful sugar. 1 lemon. 1/4 lb. chopped candied citron peel. Crisco flake pastry. 1 egg. 1 cupful raisins. 1 tablespoonful melted Crisco. 1/4 teaspoonful salt Roll pastry thin and cut out large cakes of it. Beat egg, add sugar, Crisco, rind and strained juice of lemon, salt, citron, and raisins. Mix and put tablespoonful of mixture on each of pastry cakes, wet edges of paste and fold like old fashioned turn over. Do not stick with fork or juice will run out. Lay turn overs on Criscoed tins and bake in hot oven from twelve to fifteen minutes.
Sufficient for twelve tarts.
This page has come down to us with its ingredient list sheared off — only the tail end, "1/4 teaspoonful salt," survives above the method. The procedure is complete and workable, but you are supplying the proportions yourself; it is essentially the Banbury tart, a lemon-raisin turnover.
- The missing quantitiesEgg, sugar, Crisco, lemon, citron and raisins are all called for in the method but their amounts are lost with the truncated ingredient list. Do not guess at a conversion from the text; work from a filling recipe of similar type, scaled to yield the twelve tablespoonfuls the recipe expects.
- Hot ovenIn a book of this date a hot oven is generally taken to mean somewhere in the region of 425-450F, though the book gives no figure. Twelve to fifteen minutes at that heat is right for thin pastry with a small spoonful of wet filling — long enough to set and colour the crust, short enough that the sugar and juice do not boil out.
- Do not ventThe instruction not to prick the pastry is the hinge of the recipe and runs against the habit of steam-venting pies. The filling here is loose and syrupy; any hole becomes a channel and the juice caramelises onto the tin. Seal the edges firmly instead, and press with the back of a fork tine rather than piercing.
- Criscoed tinsThis simply means a baking sheet greased with the shortening. Parchment does the same job and handles the inevitable leaks better.
- Crisco in the fillingCrisco is creamed into the lemon-sugar mixture as well as being used to grease the tins, and — in a book of this kind — presumably in the pastry too, though that part of the ingredient list is lost. In the filling it works as butter would in a lemon-curd-style mixture, keeping it soft rather than setting hard. Butter is a direct substitute.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in the baking aisle at Christmas and otherwise hard to find. Candied mixed peel or candied orange peel, finely chopped, stands in without complaint.
- Yield and shapeTwelve tarts. "Large cakes" of pastry presumably means rounds big enough to fold over a tablespoonful of filling into half-moons; the recipe gives no size. Keep the pastry genuinely thin, since the filling is rich and the appeal is the ratio.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, who had put Crisco on the market in 1911 as the first widely sold hydrogenated vegetable shortening. The book's job was to persuade cooks that a manufactured fat could replace butter and lard everywhere, which is why Crisco turns up in the filling of these turnovers as well as on the tins — an early and thorough exercise in branded recipe publishing. The tart itself is older than the fat: a folded pastry of chopped raisins, candied citron and lemon in a sugar-and-egg binding is the filling generally traced to Banbury in Oxfordshire, carried into American cookbooks through the nineteenth century as Banbury tarts or cakes, and belonging to the same family as the Eccles cake of Eccles in Lancashire. The name "old fashioned turn over" in the method suggests Neil expected her readers to know the shape already and needed only to sell them the shortening.