Preserves
Cream Crisco and sugar, then add eggs well beaten, flour, salt, baking powder, and extract. Line twelve tartlet tins with pastry, put teaspoonful of preserves in each, then divide mixture into them, and bake in moderately hot oven twenty minutes. Sufficient for twelve tartlets.
BREADS &c.
T HE usual method of making bread is to ferment dough with yeast; the latter acts upon certain constituents in the flour ultimately producing a gas which permeates the dough.
The dough is placed in a very hot oven, the heat kills the yeast plant, the gas expands with the heat, still raising the dough. The loaf is set in shape, and, when finally cooked and the gas all escaped, will be found to be light and full of tiny holes. Certain factors hasten or delay these changes. A moist, warm medium being most favorable to the growth of the yeast, the water should just be lukewarm; then a good flour, containing about 8 per cent of gluten is necessary. This gluten is the proteid in flour; when well mixed with water it forms a viscid elastic substance, hence it is necessary to well knead dough to make it more springy, so that when the gas is generated in it, it will expand and take the form of a sponge, and thus prevent the gas from escaping. The bread must be put into a very hot oven at first, 340° F., so that the yeast plant is killed quickly. If this be not accomplished soon, the loaf may go on spreading in the oven, and, if not sour in taste, will not be of such a good flavor. Plenty of salt in dough is said to strengthen the gluten, give a good flavor to the bread, and keep it moist for a longer time, but it rather retards the working of the yeast. Flour also may be made into a light loaf by using baking powder to produce the gas. This is a much quicker process, but the bread is not liked so universally as when made with yeast. For, when yeast is used, other changes take place in the dough besides the production of the gas, that seem to give bread the characteristic flavor constantly welcome by the palate. Good flour has a slight pure smell, free from any moldy odor.
Yeast is a fungoid growth, a microscropic plant capable of starting a fermentation in various substances. It grows Breads, etc. should be soft and little more milk can be added if needed. Roll out lightly and handle as little as possible. Cut with biscuit cutter, lay on Criscoed tins and bake in hot oven ten minutes.
Sufficient for thirty biscuits.
A jam tartlet built on a creamed sponge batter, from a promotional cookbook written to show what the new hydrogenated shortening could do. The method survives intact; the quantities that belong with it do not appear on this page.
- Missing quantitiesThe method opens mid-recipe, with no amounts given for the Crisco, sugar, eggs, flour, salt, baking powder or extract. A standard small sponge batter of this type runs roughly equal weights of fat, sugar, egg and flour, but the original figures are not recoverable from what is printed here.
- CriscoCrisco is a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, though the modern product has been reformulated (notably to remove trans fats) and is not identical to the cottonseed fat of the 1910s. It creams to a light, stable foam and gives a pale, tender crumb. Butter can be used in its place weight for weight, but its water content means the tartlets will brown more and set firmer when cold.
- Moderately hot ovenRead that as 375-400F. Twenty minutes at that heat is right for a shallow tartlet; the tops should spring back and the pastry edge be sandy rather than blond.
- Tartlet tinsTwelve tartlet tins means individual shallow tins of about 2 1/2 inches. A standard 12-cup muffin pan works if you line it with pastry rounds and fill each only about two-thirds, since the batter rises over the preserves.
- The preservesA teaspoonful per tartlet is deliberate restraint. Jam boils and spreads under a sponge topping, and more than that will breach the batter and weld the tartlet to the tin. A thick, well-set preserve holds better than a runny one.
- ExtractUnspecified. Vanilla or almond are the likely candidates for a plain sponge of this date, and roughly a teaspoon for a twelve-tartlet batch is a reasonable working amount, but the original figure is not recoverable from this page.
- YieldTwelve tartlets, best eaten the day they are baked. The pastry base softens under the jam by the second day.
- On the bread notes that followThe essay's figure of 340F for bread is low by modern standards; ordinary loaves go in at 425-450F, dropping to 375-400F for the bake. Its 8 per cent gluten also reflects the flours of the day, where modern bread flour runs nearer 12-14 per cent protein.
The book is probably The Story of Crisco, one of more than one Crisco cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble after Crisco went on sale in 1911, and it is one of the clearest examples of a cookbook written to create a market for a single product: the recipes name the shortening, and the pastry, cake and frying chapters exist largely to prove that a hydrogenated cottonseed fat could replace lard and butter across the whole range of domestic baking. The book is generally credited to Marion Harris Neil, a cookery writer of the period. Jam tartlets of this kind, a pastry shell with a spoonful of preserves under a light sponge, were a British and American teatable standard long before Crisco existed; the interest here is the framing, with an explanatory essay on fermentation and gluten sitting alongside the recipes to lend the pamphlet the authority of a domestic-science manual rather than an advertisement.