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Fanchonettes
Put a lining of good puff paste round some tartlet-pans, and fill with a custard. Make it as follows. Beat four eggs till they are light, stir into them two ounces of sugar and butter (the butter must be beaten till it is like cream), three-quarters of a pint of milk, and three dessert-spoonfuls of flour. When thoroughly mixed, simmer in a well-lined saucepan until thick-the mixture should not boil-and flavour with lemon, bitter almonds, or any essence preferred. When baked, slip the fanchonettes out of the pans, and while they are cooling whisk the whites of two eggs to a froth, and stir into the froth two ounces of finely-powdered sugar, with which mixture smooth the tops of the tartlets. This icing must be set for five minutes in the oven, but care must be taken to prevent the tartlets from colouring. Send to table on a white napkin garnished with coloured jelly arranged between the tartlets and around them. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Sufficient to fill one dozen tartlets.
A Victorian pastry-cook's tartlet: puff paste shells, a thick boiled custard, a meringue lid set but not browned. The awkwardness is in the order of the text rather than the technique.
- Read the sequence backwardsThe instruction to "fill with a custard" comes before the custard is made. Make the pastry cream first, cool it slightly, line the pans, fill, then bake.
- The hinge: do not let the custard boilFour eggs plus three dessertspoons of flour in three-quarters of a pint of milk is a flour-stabilised pastry cream, and the original is emphatic that it must only simmer. Stir constantly over low heat until it coats the spoon thickly; a boil will scramble the egg and split the mixture.
- Ambiguous quantity"Two ounces of sugar and butter" most likely means two ounces of each, but the phrasing genuinely will not settle the question. Two ounces of each (about 1/4 cup butter, scant 1/3 cup sugar) gives a balanced custard.
- UnitsThree-quarters of an imperial pint is about 1 3/4 cups; a scant 1 3/4 cups works. A dessertspoon is roughly two teaspoons, so three of them is about two tablespoons of flour.
- OvenNo temperature is given because none could be. Puff paste tartlets want a hot oven, 400-425F, for the twenty minutes stated; the pastry needs that heat to lift and set before the custard overcooks.
- Setting the icing without colouring itFive minutes in a hot oven will brown a meringue. Return the tartlets to a cool oven, 250-275F, or use only residual heat, to dry the surface while keeping it white -- the whole point of the finish here is that it stays pale.
- Bitter almondsThe "bitter almonds" of the flavouring list means bitter almond essence, generally sold today as a benzaldehyde-based extract and used a drop or two at a time. Whole bitter almonds themselves are not a supermarket ingredient and are not the intended substitute.
- ServingTwelve tartlets, served cold on a folded napkin with cubes of set jelly between them -- a period presentation you can replace with a simple platter without losing anything but the napkin.
The name is a French pâtisserie diminutive, generally explained as coming from Fanchon, the pet form of Françoise, and it entered English cookery books through the nineteenth-century fashion for French pastry vocabulary -- Cassell's keeps the French term rather than calling the thing a custard tartlet with meringue. The construction is orthodox pâtisserie: a shell, a flour-thickened crème pâtissière, and a meringue set pale rather than browned. Its inclusion in a general dictionary of cookery reflects how much professional French method had filtered into ambitious middle-class English kitchens by the late Victorian period.