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Custard Tartlets
Line some patty-pans with a good crust. Make a custard (see CUSTARD, BAKED), flavour it nicely, and three parts fill the pans with the custard. Bake the tartlets in a gentle oven. Take them out, let them cool, and spread a little sugar icing over them. This is made by mixing the whites of two eggs with two ounces of pounded loaf sugar. Strew a little more sugar on the top, and bake them in a gentle oven until the icing is crisp. If a richer tartlet is wanted, a little jam may be put under the custard. Time, about a quarter of an hour to bake the tartlets, five or six minutes to harden the icing. Probable cost, 2d. each. Allow one for each person.
A Victorian tartlet in two firings: bake the custard, cool it, then a thin egg-white icing goes on and back into a cool oven to crisp. The second bake is the part most likely to go wrong.
- Gentle ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'gentle' is conventionally read as a slow oven, somewhere around 300-325F (150-160C). Custard baked much hotter tends to curdle and weep, and the low heat is what gives a smooth set.
- Patty-pansShallow tinned tartlet moulds, roughly the size of a modern 12-hole bun or muffin tin cup. Line with shortcrust rolled thin, about 1/8 inch.
- Blind bake firstThe original does not mention it, but a raw shell filled with wet custard at low heat will stay pale and soft underneath. Baking the cases empty with weights for 10-12 minutes before filling is one way round this.
- Three parts fullNot a quirk of phrasing but a working instruction: custard rises slightly as it sets, and an overfilled pan spills into the pastry rim and glues the tartlet in.
- TimingA quarter of an hour suits very small pans. Judge by the centre, which should wobble as one piece and not ripple like liquid; residual heat finishes the set as they cool.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in a hard cone and broken off as needed, then pounded. Use icing sugar and skip the pounding; two ounces is about half a cup, sifted.
- The icingTwo whites to two ounces of sugar gives a thin, pourable glaze rather than a stiff royal icing. Spread it in a film; a thick layer will not crisp in five minutes and will stay tacky.
- Cool before icingStated in the original and worth respecting. Icing on a warm custard slides off the domed centre and pools at the edge.
- Yield and cost"2d. each" is twopence in pre-decimal money, and the recipe assumes one tartlet per person. A batch of twelve from a standard bun tin is the practical scale.
Baked custard in a pastry case is one of the oldest sweet dishes in the English repertoire, generally traced to the medieval crustade - a term for a crusted pie or tart, so that the filling is often said to have taken its name from its container rather than the other way round. By the time Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was compiled, the custard tart had settled into exactly this domestic form: a cheap, reliable use for eggs and milk, costed to the penny for a household keeping accounts. The dictionary format explains the cross-reference to CUSTARD, BAKED rather than a repeated ingredient list; readers were expected to work between entries. The optional spoonful of jam beneath the custard, and the crisped sugar-and-white glaze on top, are the sort of small elaborations that separated a tea-table tartlet from a plain nursery pudding.