Apple Tarts
Pare, quarter, core, and boil in a half tea-cup of water until very soft, ten large tart apples; beat till very smooth, then add the yolks of six eggs or three whole eggs, juice and grated rind of two lemons, half cup butter, one and a half cups sugar, or more if not sweet enough; beat all thoroughly, line little tart-tins with puff-paste, and fill with the mixture, bake five minutes in a hot oven. wanted very nice, take the whites of the six eggs (when the yolks of six are used), mix with six table-spoons pulverized sugar, spread on the top of the tarts, return to oven and brown slightly. If For almond tarts, beat to a cream the yolks of three eggs and a quarter of a pound of sugar, add half a pound of shelled almonds pounded slightly, put in tart-tins lined with puff-paste; bake eight minutes.
For cocoa-nuts, dissolve half pound sugar in quarter of a pint water, add half a grated cocoa-nut, let this boil slowly for a few minutes, and when cold, add the well-beaten yolks of three eggs and the white of one; beat all well together, and pour into pattypans lined with a rich crust; bake a few minutes. When removed from oven, cover the tarts with a meringue made of the whites of the three eggs, mixed with three table-spoons sugar; return to oven, and brown delicately.
Three fillings in one entry, all built on the same idea: a thick, egg-enriched puree spooned into small puff-paste shells and given only a few minutes of heat. The text as printed is garbled — the sentence "If wanted very nice, take the whites of the six eggs..." has been broken by a typesetting slip, and the meringue direction belongs to the apple tarts.
- The hinge: bake the shells firstFive minutes in a hot oven will not cook raw puff paste through, and the fillings here are already cooked or nearly so. Blind-bake the lined tins until the pastry is set and pale gold, then fill and return them to the oven only long enough to set the egg — roughly 10 to 15 minutes at 350F for the apple and coconut fillings.
- "Hot oven"Generally taken as somewhere around 400 to 450F in nineteenth-century usage. Puff paste wants that heat; a custardy egg filling does not, which is another reason to separate the two bakes.
- Ten large tart applesAbout 4 to 4 1/2 lb, or roughly 3 lb prepared. Granny Smith, Bramley or Rhode Island Greening give the sharpness the recipe assumes. The half teacup of water (about 1/3 cup) is only to stop scorching; cook covered and stir often until the fruit collapses.
- Pulverized sugarLoaf sugar crushed and sieved at home — closest to today's superfine (caster) sugar, not modern powdered sugar, which carries cornstarch. Superfine dissolves cleanly into meringue.
- Pattypans and tart-tinsSmall shallow tins of 2 to 3 inches, like modern tartlet or muffin-top tins. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works, though the shells will be deeper and want a little more baking.
- The almond fillingHalf a pound of shelled almonds "pounded slightly" gives a coarse paste, not flour; blanch them first if you want the pale colour of the period. With only three yolks and a quarter pound of sugar binding it, this bakes as a chewy frangipane — eight minutes is again too short once the shells are filled.
- Half a grated cocoa-nutA fresh coconut, cracked and grated on a box grater — about 1 1/2 to 2 cups. Unsweetened desiccated coconut substitutes, but soak it in the hot sugar syrup rather than boiling it hard, or it turns stringy.
- MeringueSix whites to six tablespoons sugar is a soft, low-sugar meringue that weeps if it stands. Beat to firm peaks, spread to the pastry edge so it seals, and brown at 350F for 8 to 10 minutes rather than blasting it.
- YieldThe apple filling is generous — 18 to 24 small tarts. The almond and coconut mixtures each fill about 12.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and first published in Minnesota and Ohio around 1877, was a subscription book assembled from contributions by many housekeepers, which is why entries like this one stack several unrelated fillings under a single heading. The small open tart baked in a pattypan is much older than the book, descending from English recipes in which a sweetened fruit or nut paste was set in a shell of puff paste; the same construction gives us Bakewell and maids of honour. The coconut called for would have been a whole nut, grated by hand. The lemon in the apple filling does the work sugar cannot, and the note "or more if not sweet enough" is a reminder that cooks then worked with whatever apples the cellar held rather than a standardised supermarket variety.