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Polish Tartlets
If a little piece of puff-paste is left after making vol-au-vents, or tarts, or any other articles of that sort, it may be advantageously used as follows. Roll out the pastry till it is very thin, and cut it into pieces a little more than two inches square. Moisten the surface of these with a little water, and fold over the corners so that they will all meet in the centre. Put a little ball of pastry in the centre of each, and press it lightly down with the finger. Brush the tartlets over with egg, sprinkle a little powdered sugar upon them, and bake in a hot oven. Before serving, put a little bright-coloured jam round the little ball of pastry, and serve the tartlets on a neatly-folded napkin. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 6d. each. Sufficient, a quarter of a pound of puff pastry for each moderate-sized dish.
A thrift recipe for puff-paste trimmings, and it works with a sheet of shop-bought all-butter puff. The one thing to get right is that the jam goes on after baking, not before.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; in modern terms a hot oven for puff is around 425-450F (220-230C). Puff needs that initial blast to turn its water to steam and lift the layers; a moderate oven melts the butter out and gives you a flat, greasy square.
- Baking timeA quarter of an hour is the outside limit for pastry rolled very thin. Start checking at 10 minutes and pull them when the folds are crisp and deep gold — the sugar on top will scorch before the pastry does.
- Re-rolling scrapsDo not knead the trimmings into a ball, which destroys the lamination. Stack the pieces flat, one on another, and roll them out in a single direction to keep the layers going the same way.
- The little ballThe ball in the centre appears to act as a weight, holding the four folded corners down so they do not spring open, as well as giving the jam something to sit around. Make it about the size of a pea and press it just enough to stick.
- Sugar and egg"Powdered sugar" in a British book of this date means finely ground granulated, closer to today's caster sugar than to icing sugar. Either browns well over egg wash; icing sugar will melt to a glaze.
- JamWarm the jam slightly so it spoons neatly into the four hollows around the ball. Adding it before baking is a mistake — it boils over the edges and welds the tartlets to the tray.
- YieldA quarter-pound (about 115g) of pastry rolled thin gives a dozen or so two-inch squares, enough for one dish. The stated "probable cost, 6d. each" may refer to the dish rather than the individual tartlet.
- ServingBest within a couple of hours of baking, while the pastry is still crisp. The original directs that they be served on a neatly-folded napkin.
The purpose of such a recipe is economy: a Victorian kitchen made puff paste by hand in a laborious series of turns, and the offcuts from a vol-au-vent case were far too valuable to throw out. Recipes "for the remains of puff-paste" appear throughout nineteenth-century English cookery books, usually as small sweet trifles of exactly this kind. The name is decorative rather than descriptive — English and French cookery of the period attached "Polish", "Russian" and "à la Polonaise" fairly freely to small folded or filled pastries, and no particular link to Poland is documented for this one. The folded-corner shape itself is very old and very widespread, surviving today in the Danish pastry and in the Jewish hamantasch, both of which use a fold to trap a spoonful of fruit.