Home › A Calendar of Dinners › October 29
October 29
Menu: Cream of Spinach Soup; Baked White Fish, Caper Sauce; Rice Groquettes; Celery; String Beans; Boiled Dressing; Coffee; Chestnut Tartlets Chestnut Tartlets-Boil and mash 1 pint chestnuts, add 1/4 cup each creamed Crisco and cream, 1 beaten yolk, 1/4 cup powdered sugar, little salt, and 1½ cups milk. Cover inverted small tartlet tins with Crisco pastry, bake, and fill with mixture, and bake again.
A 1913 tartlet from the Crisco book's day-by-day menu calendar, set down in the terse shorthand the section uses throughout. The proportions need a second look before you commit.
- The milk is the problemA pint of mashed chestnuts with a quarter cup of cream and a beaten yolk will not absorb 1½ cups of milk and stay in a pastry shell. Either the filling was meant to be cooked down to a thick custard on the stove before it went in, or the figure is a misprint. Treat it as ambiguous and add milk gradually until you have a mixture that mounds on a spoon.
- A pint of chestnutsThe recipe does not say whether this is measured in the shell or shelled; if shelled and raw, a pint is roughly 10 to 12 oz, or somewhat over a pound in the shell. Score the flat side, boil 15 minutes, and peel while hot; both the shell and the inner brown skin come away far more easily before they cool.
- Creamed CriscoVegetable shortening beaten alone until soft and pale, as you would cream butter for a cake. Crisco was new in 1911 and the book uses it everywhere; butter works in both the pastry and the filling.
- Baking over inverted tinsPastry rounds are draped over the outside of upturned tartlet moulds so they bake into free-standing cups. Prick them, chill them firmly before baking, and expect some slumping if the dough is warm.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven temperature or timing. In modern terms the empty shells suit a hot oven until set and lightly coloured, and the filled second bake a moderate one, long enough only to set the yolk.
- Powdered sugarIn 1913 usage this meant finely ground sugar, not necessarily the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today; either will work here. Chestnuts are starchy rather than sweet, so a quarter cup gives a mildly sweet filling; taste before filling if you want more.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; the quantities suggest roughly a dozen small tartlets. The page places them with the coffee at the end of the October 30 dinner.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook for the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening the company had introduced two years earlier, with recipes credited to the cookery writer Marion Harris Neil. Its "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a complete menu to every day of the year, which is why this tartlet arrives labelled October 30 and filed under the coffee course rather than as a standalone dessert. Chestnuts were an obvious late-October choice: they were a cheap autumn staple in American cities, sold roasted on the street and boiled for stuffings and purees at home. The chestnut blight that would eventually destroy the American chestnut had been identified in New York less than a decade before. The purpose of the recipe, as with everything in the book, is to put Crisco into both the pastry and the filling in place of butter and lard.