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Sugar Paste for Tartlets
1 cupful sugar 4 cupfuls flour. ½ cupful Crisco, generous measure ½ teaspoonful salt 3 eggs 1 lemon Sift flour on to baking board, make hole in center, and put in grated lemon rind, salt, sugar, eggs, and Crisco. Mix the whole to a stiff pastry. This paste is used for the bottom layer of pies and to line tartlet tins of various kinds. It is excellent for turnovers. Sufficient for thirty tartlets.
A rich, sweet shortcrust built by the well method — fat, eggs and sugar worked together in a crater of flour. The ingredient list as printed has clearly lost lines in typesetting, so read the points below before you start.
- The missing quantitiesNo flour or sugar amount survives in this text, and the stray "1/3 cupful currants" at the end belongs to a neighbouring recipe. For a paste of this type, count on roughly 4 to 4½ cups of flour and about ¾ cup sugar to 1½ cups fat and 3 eggs; treat that as reconstruction, not as the book's own measure.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated more than once; today's US product is based on soybean oil with palm oil, including fully hydrogenated palm oil, and is labelled as containing no partially hydrogenated fat. Bakers generally find it a little softer than the older formula, so results may not be identical to 1913. Butter can be substituted, but its water content means it is not an exact swap and will give a softer, less snappy result.
- "Generous measure"It is not clear from the text whether this means a cupful pressed firm and levelled or simply a little more than level; either reading is possible. Weighing is steadier: 1½ cups of packed shortening is about 290 g.
- The well methodWorking directly on the board keeps the flour from being overhandled — the fat, eggs and sugar are paddled together in the centre with the fingertips, and flour is drawn in from the walls only at the end. Stop as soon as it coheres; this dough turns tough quickly because of the eggs.
- Rest before rollingThe book does not say so, but a sweet egg paste rolls and holds its shape far better after 30 to 60 minutes chilled. Warm from mixing it will tear and slump in the tins.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest; the pith is bitter.
- BakingNo temperature is given. Small tartlet shells blind-bake well at 375F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges are set and pale gold; the sugar makes them colour faster than a plain crust, so watch the rims.
- YieldThirty tartlets from the full batch, as the book states. The dough freezes well wrapped tight.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a product that had no precedent in the American kitchen: a shelf-stable white vegetable shortening, introduced in 1911, that was neither lard nor butter. The book's strategy throughout is to take recipes cooks already recognised — this pâte sucrée-style sugar paste is straight out of the European pastry tradition, built by the classic well-in-the-flour method — and simply swap the fat, demonstrating that the new product could stand in anywhere. Sweet egg pastes of this kind were often used to line tartlet tins in professional and ambitious domestic baking, and the recipe's confident "sufficient for thirty tartlets" points at a household still expecting to turn out pastry by the tray. The garbled ingredient list here may as easily come from later transcription of the text as from the original printing.