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Currant Tartlets
1/3 cupful currants. 3 tablespoonfuls ground rice 2 whites of eggs 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3/4 cupful sponge cake crumbs 4 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 tablespoonfuls chopped candied orange peel ½ teaspoonful lemon extract Pinch of salt Crisco pastry 1 tablespoonful cream Cream Crisco and sugar together, add ground rice, crumbs, peel, currants, cream, salt, lemon extract, and whites of eggs well beaten. Roll out paste, cut into rounds, line some Criscoed tartlet tins with rounds. put in each a tablespoonful of the mixture. Bake tartlets in moderate oven from twelve to fifteen minutes. Or, these tartlets may be covered with frosting, and a little chopped cocoanut sprinkled over tops. Sufficient for nine tartlets.
Pastries 1 cupful sugar 1 lemon
A frangipane-style filling bound with rice flour and cake crumbs rather than ground almonds — cheap, sturdy, and typical of the Crisco book's habit of rebuilding classic pastry around vegetable shortening. The ingredient list as printed has gaps, so read the method first.
- Missing currantsThe method calls for currants but no quantity appears in the list. Something in the region of 1/3 cupful of dried currants would suit nine small tartlets; the original figure is simply lost.
- Stray line at the end"1 cupful sugar 1 lemon" does not belong to this recipe; it appears to be a fragment of an adjacent one picked up in transcription. Ignore it.
- Ground riceEssentially rice flour, though the period product was a coarser grind than the fine plain (not glutinous) rice flour sold today. It gives the filling a slightly sandy bite that regular wheat flour will not reproduce.
- CriscoAny solid all-vegetable shortening works. Modern Crisco has been reformulated to reduce trans fat and will not behave identically to the 1913 product; keep it cool while creaming or the filling will slump.
- Moderate ovenNo temperature is given in the original; a moderate oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. Twelve to fifteen minutes suits shallow tartlet tins; the filling should be set and just coloured at the edges.
- Sponge cake crumbsDry, day-old plain sponge, crumbled fine — not fresh cake, which packs into a paste. Stale pound cake or ladyfingers substitute cleanly.
- Egg whitesBeat to soft peaks and fold in last, despite the running order of the sentence. Stirring them in with everything else costs you the lift that keeps the filling from turning dense.
- YieldNine tartlets, as stated, using roughly a tablespoonful of filling each. The pastry rounds should be cut about an inch wider than the tin.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's book-length argument for a new product: a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening meant to displace lard and butter in every branch of American cooking. Pastry seems to have been a hard sell, and the book is thick with tartlets, pies and tarts recast around Crisco. The filling here resembles an older British tradition of the almond-less cheesecake or maid-of-honour tart, where ground rice and cake crumbs stand in for expensive ground almonds he the the shortening — though the resemblance need not imply descent. Candied orange peel and dried currants were pantry staples of the period, and lemon extract did the work that a fresh zest would do now.