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December 11
Menu: Roast Pork, Apple Sauce; Franconia Potatoes Creamed Onions; Endive and Grape Salad; Lemon and Apple Tart; Mix; Coffee Lemon and Apple Tart-Line a large pie plate with Crisco pastry. together 2 cups grated apple, grated rind and juice of 1 lemon, 1½ cups sugar, 2 eggs, beaten without separating whites and yolks, 2 tablespoons melted Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1 cup thin cream. into plate lined with pastry, wet edge, and put strips of pastry over top of filling. Finish with strip of pastry on edge. Let bake until firm in center. them. Pour chicken broth over layers, well seasoned with salt and pepper. Add enough water to almost fill pot. Cover pot, and bake for 12 hours. Be sure plenty of water is in pot while baking is in progress. When cooked put baked chicken and vegetables in large tureen. Garnish edges with parsley. Sprinkle parsley and sliced cooked carrots over top. Serve with small slice of toast on each plate.
The page as printed has suffered badly in transcription: verbs have dropped out of the tart method, and the second half belongs to an entirely different dish (a long-baked chicken pot from elsewhere in the calendar). Read the tart on its own and supply the missing words.
- The missing verbsThe sentences beginning "together 2 cups grated apple" and "into plate lined with pastry" have lost their openings: Mix together, and Pour into.
- Ignore the chickenEverything from "them. Pour chicken broth over layers" to the parsley garnish is stray text from a separate recipe. It has no bearing on the tart and should not be attempted as part of it.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal in 1913. A custard-set fruit pie of this kind wants a hot start to set the bottom crust, around 425F for the first 15 minutes, then 350F until the center is just firm, roughly 40 to 50 minutes more.
- Thin creamThis is what is now sold as light cream, about 18 to 20 percent butterfat. Half-and-half is the nearest common substitute; heavy cream will make the filling dense and slightly greasy alongside the melted shortening.
- CriscoThe all-vegetable shortening the book was written to sell. It is still made, though reformulated in the 2000s to remove partially hydrogenated oil, so it behaves a little differently in pastry - keep it and the water very cold. Lard or butter can be substituted in the crust at the same weight.
- Grated appleTwo cups is roughly two to three medium firm apples, grated coarsely on a box grater with the peel off. Grate them last and toss with the lemon juice at once, or they will brown in the bowl.
- The sugarA cup and a half against two cups of apple is very sweet by current taste, and the lemon is the only counterweight. A cup is enough for most palates, particularly with a tart apple.
- Doneness"Firm in center" is the right test but easy to overshoot. The filling is an egg custard; pull the tart when the middle still has a slight wobble, as it will continue to set as it cools. Cool completely before cutting or it will run.
- YieldOne large pie plate, eight to ten slices. Best at room temperature the day it is baked; refrigerate any that survives, since it is a cream and egg custard.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was the promotional cookbook that accompanied the launch of hydrogenated cottonseed shortening two years earlier - a product with no culinary tradition behind it, which is precisely why it needed a book. The "Calendar of Dinners" section that this page comes from assigned a full menu to every day of the year, a common device in early twentieth-century domestic literature that spared the housekeeper the daily labor of deciding, while giving the new fat ample occasion to turn up in the pastry, the frying pan and the cake. The tart itself is an older idea than its shortening: grated apple bound with eggs, cream, sugar and lemon is a lattice-topped custard pie of a type long common in American and English home baking, and the only thing distinctively 1913 about it is the two tablespoons of melted Crisco stirred into the filling.