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Strawberry Tartlets
Bake some good pastry in patty-pans, and fill with small ripe strawberries of equal size. Make a syrup of half a pint of strawberry-juice and six ounces of sugar, bringing it to the boil and skimming it well. As soon as a little poured on a cold plate will stiffen remove the pan at once from the fire, and when the syrup has cooled a little fill up the patty-pans.
A three-part assembly: blind-baked shells, raw fruit, and a reduced juice glaze poured over. The glaze is the only thing that needs judgement.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet tins, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches across. A 12-hole bun tin works; the recipe gives no yield, so the number of shells the syrup will cover has to be judged on the day.
- Bake the shells blind"Bake some good pastry in patty-pans" means empty shells, fully cooked and cooled, since the fruit goes in raw afterwards. Line, dock and weight with beans or rice. The recipe gives no temperature or time; a hot oven of about 400F for 12-15 minutes, then uncovered to dry out and colour, is the modern equivalent. Damp pastry under a wet glaze collapses.
- Half a pintCassell's is a British book, so this is an imperial half-pint of 10 fl oz, or about 1 1/4 US cups. Six ounces of sugar is roughly 3/4 cup plus a tablespoon by weight.
- Getting the juiceCrush about 1 1/2 lb of hulled strawberries with a little of the sugar, leave an hour, then strain through a jelly bag or fine sieve without pressing hard if you want the syrup clear.
- The setting test"A little poured on a cold plate will stiffen" is the jelly test, around 220F on a thermometer. Strawberries are low in pectin and acid, so the syrup may thicken but never truly gel; a squeeze of lemon juice helps, and a lightly syrupy glaze is the realistic outcome.
- Cool before pouringBoiling syrup poured over raw berries cooks and slumps them, which is why the recipe says to let it cool a little before filling up the patty-pans. Spoon it over so it coats rather than floods.
- SkimmingStrawberry juice throws a good deal of pink scum. Skim it off as it rises, or the finished glaze looks cloudy.
- ServingAssemble within an hour or two of eating. The shells soften quickly and the fruit weeps, so these do not keep overnight.
Tartlets of this kind are usually associated with the late-Victorian dessert course, where small pastries were valued for looking uniform on a tiered stand -- hence, it is often suggested, the instruction to use berries "of equal size", which may be about appearance rather than flavour. The recipe demonstrates a general method as much as a dish: a cooked shell, uncooked fruit, and a reduced fruit-juice glaze that sets as the sugar concentrates. The cold-plate test the recipe uses is the same one that governed all domestic jam and jelly making before sugar thermometers were common in home kitchens, and before commercial pectin was available in Britain. Strawberries were a short-season luxury for most households, so a recipe that shows the fruit raw and whole, rather than baked into a pudding, was a way of putting the best of a brief glut on the table.