Tartlets
4 tablespoonfuls sugar ½ eggs 1/2 teaspoonful baking powder 1/4 teaspoonful salt 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful flour
This is an ingredient list rather than a full method — the book assumes a cook who knows how to make a sweet paste and line patty pans. What follows fills in the gaps and translates the measures.
- No method is givenThe proportions describe a rich sweet paste, not a flaky crust: cream the Crisco and sugar, beat in the eggs, then work in the flour sifted with the baking powder and salt. Chill the dough before rolling, or it will be too soft to handle.
- What a tartlet pan meantTartlets of this period were baked in shallow tin patty pans, roughly 2 1/2 to 3 inches across. A modern 12-cup muffin tin or a set of small tartlet tins works; this quantity of dough lines about a dozen.
- Measure conversions4 tablespoonfuls of Crisco is 1/4 cup, about 2 oz. Four tablespoonfuls of sugar is 1/4 cup. A cupful of flour of this period is usually reckoned at about 4 to 4 1/2 oz., depending on whether it is sifted.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Small sweet pastry shells of this type bake at 375-400F for 10-15 minutes, until set and pale gold at the edges. Anything hotter and the sugar in the dough colours before the centre cooks.
- Baking powder in pastryThe half teaspoonful is not a mistake. Egg-and-shortening pastes of this kind sometimes carried a little leavening to lighten a dough that has no water and no lamination. It gives a short, biscuit-like shell rather than a flaky one.
- Blind bakingWith no filling specified, these are most likely shells to be baked empty and filled afterwards with jam, curd or custard. Prick the bases and weight them, or the egg-rich dough may puff and lose its shape.
- Crisco is not what it wasThe 1913 product was cottonseed oil hydrogenated to a firm, waxy solid. Today's Crisco is a reformulated blend made to cut trans fats and may handle differently, so the dough benefits from a firm chill.
The Story of Crisco was published in 1913 by Procter & Gamble, two years after the shortening itself went on sale, and it is a promotional cookbook in the fullest sense: every recipe in it uses the product, and the recipes exist to prove that the new hydrogenated fat could do everything butter, lard and suet did. Pastry was the crucial test, since a shortening that could not make a decent crust had no future in an American kitchen. A tartlet paste bound with whole eggs and sugar rather than water was a shrewd choice for the demonstration — it is forgiving, it browns handsomely, and it puts the fat's texture rather than a cook's skill at lamination on display. The company also promoted Crisco heavily as a neutral fat acceptable to households that kept kosher, a selling point repeated in its early advertising.