Lemon Tarts
One tea-cup white sugar, one tea-cup hot water, one tablespoon corn starch, one tablespoon melted butter, the rind and juice of one lemon. Cook for a few minutes in a farina kettle, then add one well beaten egg and the yolk of another, line patty pans with a rich paste and bake them. When crust is done, fill with mixture, make a soufla with the white of one egg and a little pulverized sugar. Cover the tops with this and return to the oven to brown.
A cornstarch-thickened lemon curd baked into pre-cooked tartlet shells and finished with meringue. The whole thing hinges on the order of operations: the shells are baked empty, the filling is cooked separately on the stove, and only the meringue goes back into the oven.
- Farina kettleA double boiler — the inner pan sat over simmering water in the outer. Use a heatproof bowl over a pan of water, or a heavy saucepan over low heat with constant stirring.
- Tea-cupIn American books of this period a tea-cup is usually reckoned at about 6 fl oz, smaller than the modern 8 oz measuring cup. Sugar and water are given in the same measure here, so keeping them equal matters more than the absolute size.
- Corn starchOne tablespoon to a cup of liquid gives a soft, spoonable set, not a sliceable one. Let it come to a full bubble and cook a minute or two beyond that or the filling keeps a raw, chalky starch taste.
- Adding the eggsWhisk a ladle of the hot starch mixture into the beaten egg and yolk first, then return everything to the pan and cook gently until thick. Dropping cold egg straight into hot starch will scramble it.
- Patty pans and rich pastePatty pans are small tartlet or muffin tins; rich paste is a short crust with a high proportion of butter. Line, prick the bases and blind bake at about 400F until fully coloured — the shells get no further real baking.
- "Soufla"Apparently a phonetic rendering of soufflé, used here for what we would call a meringue: one white beaten stiff with a spoonful or two of powdered sugar. Spread it over the filling while the filling is still warm and take it right to the pastry edge, which helps keep it from shrinking and weeping.
- BrowningReturn to a moderate oven, 350F, for five to eight minutes, just until the peaks colour. A hotter oven browns the surface before the meringue sets underneath.
- YieldEnough filling for six to eight small tartlets, depending on the depth of the tins. Best eaten the day they are made; the starch filling weeps on standing.
Cornstarch is the tell here. Commercial corn starch became widely available in American kitchens from the middle of the nineteenth century and was promoted hard as a cheap, reliable thickener for puddings, pie fillings and sauces — work that had previously called for more eggs, or for costlier arrowroot. This tart is the thrifty version of a lemon curd tartlet: where an older English recipe would bind a cup of lemon and butter with three or four yolks, this one uses a single whole egg, one extra yolk and a spoonful of starch, and then puts the spare white to work as the topping so nothing is wasted. The meringue-capped lemon tart and its full-sized cousin, lemon meringue pie, spread through American cookbooks over roughly the same stretch of the nineteenth century, and the misspelled "soufla" suggests a compiler who had heard the French word spoken more often than seen it written.