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June 18
Menu: Cream of Celery Soup; Stewed Chicken; Rice Croquettes Green Peas; Watercress Salad; Lemon Jelly; Iced Coffee Watercress Salad-Take plenty fresh young sprigs of watercress, wash and dry them thoroughly, put them light- ly in dish, add 3 sliced shallots. Pour over them dressing made with 3 parts melted Crisco and 1 of lemon juice or vinegar. Garnish with tufts scraped horseradish. Roast Loin of Mutton Creamed Spinach Baked Potatoes Pineapple Charlotte Maids of Honor Coffee Maids of Honor-Crisco puff pastry, 4 tablespoons sugar, 1 tablespoon ground almonds, 2 eggs, ½ teaspoon vanilla, 4 tablespoons melted Crisco, and 1 tablespoon cocoanut. Roll out Crisco puff pastry and line 8 gem pans with it. Put eggs and sugar into basin, and beat them together for 15 minutes; then stir in lightly Crisco, ground almonds, cocoanut, and vanilla. Put 3 teaspoons into each gem pan and bake in a moderate oven for 20 minutes. When cooked, sprinkle over with little sugar.
A small almond-and-coconut tartlet baked in pastry-lined tins, from the Crisco company's own promotional cookbook. The proportions are workable, but the method assumes a hand whisk and a coal range.
- Gem pansGem pans are the cast-iron muffin tins of the period, cups roughly 2 inches across. A standard 12-cup muffin tin or a tartlet tray works; line eight cups and leave the rest empty.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F. Twenty minutes is right for tartlets this size, though puff pastry benefits from the pan going onto a preheated baking sheet so the bases set before the filling loosens them.
- Fifteen minutes of beatingThat is hand-whisking time to get eggs and sugar to the ribbon. With a stand mixer on high, four to five minutes gets you there, pale and thick enough that a drizzle sits on the surface for a second.
- CocoanutDesiccated (dried, finely shredded, unsweetened) coconut, not the moist sweetened flake sold today. Sweetened flake will make the filling cloying against the 4 tablespoons of sugar already in it.
- Ground almondsAlmond flour or almond meal. A tablespoon is a small amount by modern standards for a dish in this family; it is flavouring here rather than bulk.
- Melted CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and since reformulated to cut trans fats. Melted and cooled slightly before folding in, or it will deflate the eggs. Melted unsalted butter is the more usual fat for this tart outside the pamphlet.
- Three teaspoons per panAbout half a fluid ounce, which fills a small tartlet shell roughly two-thirds. The mixture puffs and then settles; do not overfill or it runs over the pastry rim and welds the tarts to the tin.
- YieldEight tartlets. Best eaten the day they are baked, while the pastry is still crisp under the filling.
Maids of Honour are a Richmond, Surrey speciality: small puff-pastry tarts with a set curd filling, sold for centuries by bakers in the town and still associated with one shop there. The name is traditionally traced to the court at Hampton Court Palace, with various tellings crediting Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn's attendants; the story is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere firmly. The classic filling is milk curd with almonds; this version drops the curd entirely for a beaten egg, sugar, almond and coconut mixture bound with melted shortening, which is the point of the book. Marion Harris Neil, writing for Procter & Gamble, was showing that the new hydrogenated vegetable fat could stand in for butter and lard in anything, including an English teatime tart, and the Calendar of Dinners placed each recipe in a full day's menu to make the substitution look routine.
A small almond-and-coconut tartlet baked in pastry-lined tins, from the Crisco company's own promotional cookbook. The proportions are workable, but the method assumes a hand whisk and a coal range.
- Gem pansGem pans are the cast-iron muffin tins of the period, cups roughly 2 inches across. A standard 12-cup muffin tin or a tartlet tray works; line eight cups and leave the rest empty.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F. Twenty minutes is right for tartlets this size, though puff pastry benefits from the pan going onto a preheated baking sheet so the bases set before the filling loosens them.
- Fifteen minutes of beatingThat is hand-whisking time to get eggs and sugar to the ribbon. With a stand mixer on high, four to five minutes gets you there, pale and thick enough that a drizzle sits on the surface for a second.
- CocoanutDesiccated (dried, finely shredded, unsweetened) coconut, not the moist sweetened flake sold today. Sweetened flake will make the filling cloying against the 4 tablespoons of sugar already in it.
- Ground almondsAlmond flour or almond meal. A tablespoon is a small amount by modern standards for a dish in this family; it is flavouring here rather than bulk.
- Melted CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and since reformulated to cut trans fats. Melted and cooled slightly before folding in, or it will deflate the eggs. Melted unsalted butter is the more usual fat for this tart outside the pamphlet.
- Three teaspoons per panAbout half a fluid ounce, which fills a small tartlet shell roughly two-thirds. The mixture puffs and then settles; do not overfill or it runs over the pastry rim and welds the tarts to the tin.
- YieldEight tartlets. Best eaten the day they are baked, while the pastry is still crisp under the filling.
Maids of Honour are a Richmond, Surrey speciality: small puff-pastry tarts with a set curd filling, sold for centuries by bakers in the town and still associated with one shop there. The name is traditionally traced to the court at Hampton Court Palace, with various tellings crediting Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn's attendants; the story is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere firmly. The classic filling is milk curd with almonds; this version drops the curd entirely for a beaten egg, sugar, almond and coconut mixture bound with melted shortening, which is the point of the book. Marion Harris Neil, writing for Procter & Gamble, was showing that the new hydrogenated vegetable fat could stand in for butter and lard in anything, including an English teatime tart, and the Calendar of Dinners placed each recipe in a full day's menu to make the substitution look routine.