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Tartlets, Orange
Make some rich puff-paste, with which line some mince-pie tins. Put some orange marmalade into each, and squeeze fresh Seville orange-juice over them. Bake for a quarter of an hour, and strew pounded sugar over. The tartlets are good hot or cold.
A three-line Victorian tartlet that depends almost entirely on the pastry and the sharpness of the fruit. The one thing to get right is heat: puff paste in a shallow tin needs a hot oven or it slumps into greasy layers.
- Oven heatThe original gives no oven heat, only "bake for a quarter of an hour." Puff paste in a shallow tin wants a hot oven: try 425F, on a preheated baking sheet if your tins are thin, and check at 12 minutes; a quarter of an hour suits tins of roughly 2 to 2.5 inches.
- Mince-pie tinsThese are shallow patty tins, about 2.5 inches across and half an inch deep, the same pans used for mincemeat pies at Christmas. A standard 12-hole bun or tartlet tray is the modern equivalent; a deep muffin tin is not.
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar, which is what we now buy as caster or superfine sugar. Icing sugar will dissolve into the hot marmalade rather than sitting on top.
- Seville orangesBitter oranges, in season only from late December to February in most markets. If you cannot get them, the nearest balance is the juice of a sweet orange with a good squeeze of lemon; the point of the juice is acid to cut the sugar in the marmalade, not extra sweetness.
- Don't overfillA rounded teaspoon to a scant tablespoon per tartlet is plenty. Marmalade boils and climbs once the pastry sets, and a full tin will send hot sugar over the rim, where it welds to the tin.
- Puff paste as boughtAll-butter shop puff pastry, rolled to about 1/8 inch, does the job of the book's "rich puff-paste." Keep it cold to the moment it goes in, and dock the bases lightly so they do not lift the filling.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. As a working estimate, one 12-hole tray takes roughly 8 to 10 oz of pastry and about 6 oz of marmalade. They are best the day they are made; the pastry softens under the fruit overnight.
Orange marmalade in a small pastry case was a standing item in English confectionery long before Cassell's, and the specific call for Seville orange juice explains why: the thick-skinned bitter orange from Andalusia was the marmalade orange, shipped to Britain in a short winter season and generally preserved rather than eaten out of hand. Squeezing fresh juice over preserved peel restores acidity that boiling with sugar flattens. That this appears in a dictionary of cookery in a bare few lines is unsurprising if puff paste and its handling are treated at length elsewhere in the book, leaving the tartlet entry to say only what went inside.