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Cherry Tartlets
Boil three-quarters of a pint of milk with three ounces of castor sugar and a strip of lemon-peel. Strain, add one and a half ounces of ground rice, and boil slowly for ten minutes. Then turn into a basin, add two beaten eggs, one ounce of butter, and six chopped cherries. Line some patty-pans with paste, fill with the mixture, and bake for twenty minutes in a hot oven. Probable cost, 10d.
A rice-thickened custard baked in pastry cases, closer to a small Portuguese-style tart than to a jam tartlet. The whole thing hinges on cooling the rice mixture before the eggs go in.
- Temper the eggsThe instruction to "turn into a basin" then add beaten eggs assumes the mixture will lose heat as it is transferred. Let it cool to about blood heat first, or beat a little of the hot rice into the eggs before combining; added straight to a boiling pan they will scramble and the filling will be grainy.
- MeasuresThree-quarters of an imperial pint is 15 fl oz, a little under 2 US cups. Three ounces of sugar is about 6 to 7 tablespoons; one and a half ounces of ground rice is roughly 4 to 5 tablespoons.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour, but the coarser grade sold for puddings rather than the fine flour used in gluten-free baking. Either works; the coarse grind gives a slightly sandy texture.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar. Ordinary granulated dissolves perfectly well in boiling milk here, so the distinction hardly matters in this recipe.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; a Victorian 'hot oven' is usually taken as somewhere around 425F/220C. If you blind-bake the pastry first, dropping to about 375F/190C once filled will help the custard set without blistering.
- Patty-pans and pastePatty-pans are shallow tartlet tins; a standard 12-hole bun or muffin tin is the nearest thing. "Paste" is simply the period word for pastry; a shortcrust made with butter or lard suits this filling.
- The cherriesSix chopped cherries spread over a batch of tartlets is a token flavouring, in keeping with a dish priced at tenpence. Around two-thirds of a cup of stoned, chopped fresh or bottled cherries gives something recognisably cherry without loosening the custard.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number; the quantity of filling suits roughly a dozen tartlets, depending on the size of the tins. They are best eaten the day they are made; the rice stiffens on chilling.
Ground rice was one of the cheap thickeners that made Victorian pastrycooks' work possible: it set a custard firmly and cost a fraction of cream or almonds. The book gives a "probable cost" for almost every entry, and tenpence places this squarely at the economical end, where the aim was a creditable sweet from storecupboard staples. The strip of lemon peel infused in the milk is a common nineteenth-century move for perfuming a milk pudding, used long before vanilla extract was cheap and reliable in British kitchens. Tartlets of this kind, baked in patty-pans and served cold, were common tea-table and picnic food; the cherries are decoration for a dish that is, at bottom, a rice pudding in pastry.