Home › A Calendar of Dinners › February 15
February 15
Menu: Swedish Soup; cup; Poached Eggs on Top; Stuffed Breast of Veal; Stewed Tomatoes Fried Carrots; Apple Tartlets; Coffee Apple Tartlets-Line some tartlet tins with Crisco pastry. Fill with stewed apples to which a little melted Crisco and grated nutmeg have been added. Cover with a meringue and brown in the oven for a few minutes.
A one-line sketch rather than a recipe, typical of the calendar pages, which assume the reader has already learned the book's pastry and meringue formulas. The gaps worth filling are the pastry shell, the meringue proportions and the oven.
- Crisco pastryThe book assumes its own plain pastry, made with Crisco in place of butter or lard; a standard all-shortening pie dough (about 2 cups flour to 2/3 cup shortening, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 4-6 tablespoons ice water) stands in for it. Any all-shortening or half-butter pie dough works; modern Crisco is no longer cottonseed oil but behaves much the same in pastry.
- Tartlet tinsPeriod tartlet tins are small and shallow, about 2 1/2 to 3 inches across. A 12-cup muffin tin or a tray of individual tart moulds substitutes; the above pastry lines about a dozen.
- Bake the shells firstThe filling is already cooked and the meringue needs only minutes, so the pastry must be blind-baked or it stays raw. Line, chill, weight and bake at 400F for 15 minutes, then remove the weights and give it another 5-8 minutes until dry and pale gold.
- Stewed applesFirm cooking apples stewed down with sugar to taste until thick — closer to a heavy sauce than to slices. Any liquid left in the fruit will loosen the meringue and soak the base.
- The melted Crisco in the fillingAn odd touch to modern eyes, but it is the point of the book: shortening stirred into the apple enriches it the way butter would. A tablespoon or so per pint of apple is enough; more turns the filling greasy.
- MeringueTwo egg whites beaten to soft peaks with 4 tablespoons sugar covers a dozen tartlets. Spread it so it touches the pastry rim all round, which keeps it from shrinking away as it bakes.
- "Brown in the oven for a few minutes"For a soft meringue over a warm filling, 425F for 4-6 minutes gives colour quickly. A cooler oven, 325F for 15 minutes, dries the meringue through and holds up better if the tartlets will stand before serving.
- Yield and servingAbout twelve small tartlets, meant as the sweet at the end of the February 16 dinner. Best eaten the day they are made; meringue over fruit weeps overnight.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was an advertising book in cookbook form, published two years after Crisco went on sale as what is generally described as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. The companion Crisco volume issued as A Calendar of Dinners with 615 Recipes gave a full menu for every day of the year, each one arranged so that the new fat did the work of butter, lard and suet in turn — hence the small, almost gratuitous instruction here to stir melted Crisco into the stewed apples, where an older cook would simply have added butter. The tartlet itself needs no defending: small pastry cases filled with fruit and capped with meringue were standard English and American tea-table fare through the nineteenth century, and the book's contribution is only the shortening. Cottonseed oil, Crisco's original base, had been a cheap by-product of the Southern cotton crop before hydrogenation made it solid and shelf-stable, which is much of why the product arrived when it did.