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LITTLE LADIES' TART (a pretty dish for a Juvenile party)
Rub four ounces of fresh butter into half a pound of flour. Add a pinch of salt, three ounces of pounded sugar, and three well-beaten eggs. Work these ingredients into a firm paste, and roll it out three or four times, dredging lightly with flour to prevent it sticking to the board. Make it into a round shape, about a quarter of an inch in thickness, ornament the outside edge with a fork or spoon, put it on an oven plate, and bake in a quick oven. When sufficiently cooked, take it out and let it cool. Just before serving, spread lightly over it different coloured jellies and jams, laid in strips from the centre like the spokes of a wheel. Time, about twenty-five minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A rich sweet pastry disc baked flat and decorated at the last moment. Everything hinges on keeping the jam off the pastry until serving, and on not letting a "quick oven" scorch a dough this sugary.
- The measurementsHalf a pound of flour is about 225 g (roughly 2 cups); four ounces of butter is 115 g, or one US stick. Three ounces of pounded sugar is about 85 g.
- Pounded sugarLoaf sugar crushed in a mortar, equivalent to today's caster or superfine sugar. Granulated will work but gives a slightly grittier, more spread-prone paste.
- Three eggs is a lotThree eggs to half a pound of flour is a high proportion, and the paste may come up softer and stickier than the 'firm paste' the recipe promises. Bring it together quickly; chilling it briefly before rolling will make the repeated rolling easier.
- "Roll it out three or four times"Most likely means re-rolling the same piece of paste several times rather than rolling out four separate rounds; some readers take it as rolling and folding to build a little flakiness, but the text does not say to fold. Keep the dredging flour light, as extra flour toughens the pastry.
- Oven temperatureA quick oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-425F (200-220C), which is hot for a sugared, egg-rich dough over twenty-five minutes. Around 375-400F (190-200C) for 20-25 minutes will give a pale gold round without a burnt underside.
- Oven plateA flat baking sheet or the inverted base of a tin. Line it with parchment; the sugar in the paste will otherwise weld the round to the metal as it cools.
- Keep it flatPricking the round before baking will help stop it doming, and it is easier to trim it to shape before baking than after, since it becomes brittle as it cools. The recipe specifies only the thickness, about a quarter of an inch, and gives no diameter.
- Dress it at the table, not beforeThe jam and jelly stripes are laid on the cold, fully baked round just before serving. Spread them any earlier and the moisture softens the pastry into something limp.
- YieldOne round, cut into wedges, for five or six children. Redcurrant jelly, apricot jam and damson give the strongest colour contrast against the pale pastry.
Cassell's ran to hundreds of pages of plain household cooking, so the handful of "pretty dishes" for children's parties stand out as deliberately decorative rather than economical. This one is essentially a sweetened, egg-enriched shortcrust baked as a flat disc, then striped with whatever preserves the store cupboard held, and it belongs to a Victorian nursery-table tradition in which effect was produced by arrangement rather than by expensive ingredients. The costing of 1s. 6d. is typical of the book, which priced almost every entry. The spoke-of-a-wheel pattern also reflects the period's fondness for jam-work as a form of table ornament.