Make a rich pie-dough. Line a large pie-dish with the paste and bake. Take 3 ounces of almonds and pound to a paste; add 3 tablespoonfuls of pulverized sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls of melted butter, ½ teaspoonful of cinnamon and the yolks of 2 eggs well beaten with 1 tablespoonful of rum. Add the beaten whites; fill the pie and bake in a moderate oven. Then make a glacé. Mix 1 ounce of granulated sugar with 1 tablespoonful of cold water and let come to a boil. Put on the pie when cool and serve.
A thin almond tart of the frangipane family, baked in a pre-baked shell and finished with a boiled sugar glaze. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to blind-bake and how far to take a syrup, so those are the places to be careful.
- Blind-bake properlyBlind-bake -- "Line a large pie-dish with the paste and bake" means the shell goes into the oven empty and is filled afterwards, but the recipe gives no method, temperature or time. Weighting the shell and then drying the base before filling is a modern reconstruction. The filling is shallow and sets quickly, so a raw-bottomed shell will not have time to catch up.
- Moderate oven350F. The filling is essentially a lightened almond cream and is done when it is puffed, set at the centre and lightly coloured, roughly 20-25 minutes. Shield the pastry rim with foil if it darkens first.
- Pulverized sugarIn this period, sugar finely ground at home or bought as "powdered" or "pulverized" — closest to modern confectioners' sugar, though without cornstarch. Superfine (caster) sugar works and gives a cleaner set.
- The almondsThree ounces of almonds pounded to a paste is roughly 2/3 cup of whole nuts; the recipe does not say whether they are blanched. A food processor does the work, but pulse rather than run it or you will make almond butter. This is not marzipan — no sugar syrup goes into the pounding.
- Beaten whites are the structureThere is no flour in the filling and only two yolks. The whipped whites are what keep it from baking into a dense wafer, so fold them in with a light hand and get the tart into the oven at once.
- Pan size and depthA "large pie-dish" here means 9 to 10 inches, and the filling will be shallow — under half an inch. If you want a tart with more presence, make one and a half times the filling for a 9-inch shell rather than stretching it further.
- The glacéOne ounce of sugar boiled with a tablespoon of water is a thin syrup, not an opaque icing. It brushes on as a glaze and dries to a faint shine; it will not set white. Apply it to a tart that is cool, or it soaks in and disappears.
- YieldEight thin wedges. It is rich and dry rather than juicy, and is best with coffee or a glass of something sweet rather than as a plated dessert with cream.
Almond tarts of this kind are the domestic end of a long French line — the almond cream known as frangipane, which turns up in the galette des rois, the pithiviers and the countless tartes aux amandes of provincial pastry shops. The name is traditionally traced to a Roman family called Frangipani and a perfume associated with them, though the connection is repeated far more often than it is documented. What marks this version as a household recipe rather than a patisserie one is the lightening with beaten whites in place of a stiff butter-and-almond paste, the rum by the tablespoon, and the very thin boiled-sugar glaze standing in for apricot jam or fondant. It appears here as part of a book built on the novelty of a different nation's dish for every day of the year, a format in which "French" on a dessert page was itself half the selling point.