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For Filling (Tablespoonfuls Crisco eggs)
6 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3 eggs 3/4 cupful sugar 1 lemon ½ cupful blanched powdered almonds 1/4 teaspoonful salt Make short crust of Crisco, flour, salt, and water. Roll out thin and line Criscoed pie plate with piece of paste.
For filling. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, almonds, salt, grated rind and one tablespoonful lemon juice. Mix well and spread one-half of mixture on to pastry. Then cover with a layer of pastry, the rest of mixture, and lastly cover with pastry. Bake in a moderate oven until brown. Or the pastry may be rolled out, brushed over with melted Crisco, the mixture spread over it, and rolled up to form a rolypoly. Lay on a Criscoed tin and bake in moderate oven until brown. Sufficient for one large pie.
Flake Pastry No. 1 2 cupfuls flour 8 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3/4 teaspoonful salt Just enough cold water to hold dough together Sift flour and salt and cut half the Crisco into flour with knife until it is finely divided. The finger tips may be used to finish blending materials. Pastries Then add water sparingly, mixing it with knife through dry materials. Form with the hand into dough and roll out on a floured board to quarter inch thickness. Spread one-third of remaining Crisco on two-thirds of dough nearest you; fold twice, to make three layers, folding in first that part on which Crisco has not been spread. Turn dough, putting folded edges to the sides; roll out, spread and fold as before. Repeat once more Use a light motion in handling rolling-pin, and roll from center outward. Should Crisco be too hard, it will not mix readily with flour, in which case the result will be a tough crust.
Sufficient for two covered pies. ½ teaspoonful salt 2 cupfuls flour Flake Pastry No. 2 ½ cupful Crisco Cold water Mix salt with flour; divide Crisco into four equal parts, rub in one of these only, and then mix to stiff paste with a little cold water. Shape into neat oblong piece, and roll into straight strip about three times as long as it is broad. All over this put on, with the point of knife, one of remaining quarters of Crisco, distributing it evenly in little dabs about size of a pea, so that they look like buttons on a card. Now flour surface lightly and fold paste exactly in three by taking hold of the two bottom corners and doubling them upwards from you and then of the top corners and doubling them downwards towards you. Turn now at right angles to its former position so as to have open ends pointing towards you. Press these quickly together with the roller to inclose some air, and press paste across also in two or three places, making little ridges, thus preventing air which has been shut in, from forming into large bubble. Roll out again, and repeat till remaining two parts of Crisco have thus been used. At the last rolling, bring to required thickness; and if it needs widening as well as lengthening, turn it at right angles to its former position, and roll straight across it as before, a rule which, with flaky pastry, should always be observed, since, unlike the short pastries, its lightness suffers if rolled obliquely to the direction in which it has been folded. Sufficient for two small pies. 1 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful Crisco 2 cupfuls flour
A three-layer almond pie with a shortening pastry, printed as part of Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook. The text is typeset badly: ingredient lists have drifted away from their headings and the filling recipe never states its own flour or water amounts because it borrows them from the pastry that follows.
- Read the ingredient lists carefullyThe lines "½ teaspoonful salt / 2 cupfuls flour" belong with Flake Pastry No. 2, whose heading sits below them. The printed page was checked, and the proportions given for that pastry, half a cupful of Crisco to two cupfuls of flour, are what our text now gives.
- Moderate ovenUsually read as 350 to 375F. For a pie this thick, starting at the hotter end and dropping to 350F gives better colour on the top crust without leaving the middle layer of pastry raw. Timing depends on the oven; start checking around 45 minutes.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated more than once since 1913; the original was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, today's is a soybean and palm blend. Any solid vegetable shortening works. "Criscoed" simply means greased with it.
- Blanched powdered almondsAlmond flour or finely ground blanched almonds. A cup and a half is roughly 5 oz. Grinding your own in a processor gives a coarser, better texture, but pulse in short bursts or the nuts turn to paste.
- The hinge: keep the fat coldFat temperature -- shortening warm enough to smear into the flour makes a tough, greasy crust rather than a flaky one, so use cold water and rest the dough between folds. Note that the book's own warning runs the opposite way: it says Crisco too hard will not mix readily with the flour and will likewise give a tough crust.
- Three layers of pastryThe middle sheets sit between wet layers of almond filling and will steam rather than crisp. Roll them thinner than the base and lid, and dock them with a fork so trapped steam does not lift the pie apart.
- LemonOne lemon supplies the grated zest and the single tablespoon of juice called for. Zest before juicing, and take only the yellow.
- YieldThe book says one large pie; a modern 9-inch plate suits it, and the filling is rich enough to go a long way. The same mixture can be rolled up instead as the roly-poly variation.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's book-length advertisement for a product that had gone on sale two years earlier: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a white, odourless, shelf-stable solid fat. The company's problem was that no cook had asked for such a thing, so the book supplied several hundred recipes in which Crisco stood in for butter, lard or suet, along with the coined verb "to Crisco" a pan. This almond pie belongs to a much older European family of layered nut tarts, and the filling method — creaming fat with sugar, then beating in eggs and ground almonds — is straightforwardly the frangipane technique that English and French cookery books had been printing for a century and more. The pastry instructions, particularly the fussy, precise Flake Pastry No. 2 with its dabs of fat "like buttons on a card" and its warning against rolling obliquely, read as though lifted from an English professional manual; the substitution of Crisco for butter is the only new thing in them, which was exactly the point.