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Tartlets
Tartlets may be made with puff-paste, almond paste, or any sweet pastry. They are made as follows. Butter some patty-pans, and line them with pastry rolled out to the thickness of a quarter of an inch. Trim them neatly, put a little crust of bread into each tartlet, or--since this will answer the same purpose, which is to keep the pastry from puffing up in the centre--prick two or three holes in the bottom of the tartlet; bake in a quick oven. When they are two-thirds baked, take the tartlets out of the oven, remove the bread, and in its place put a spoonful of jam or marmalade. Return them to the oven, and bake until done enough. Let them get cold before serving, ornament prettily, and send them to table piled high on a dish covered with a white napkin. Some cooks put the jam into the tartlets before they are baked at all, but this practice is certainly not to be recommended, for it spoils both the taste and the appearance of the tartlets. Time to bake them, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, about 1d. each. Sufficient, half a pound of pastry will make a moderate-sized dish of tartlets.
A general method rather than a fixed formula, and it holds up well: blind-bake the shells, fill them late, cool them fully. A few of the terms and quantities need translating.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F (200-220C); the book gives no temperature, and "quick" was a relative term. Puff paste in particular wants a hot oven so the layers lift and set before the butter runs out.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet tins or a 12-cup bun/muffin tray. A quarter-inch of pastry is thicker than most people roll today; it suits a shortcrust or almond paste, though for puff you can go a little thinner.
- The hinge is filling lateThe shells are filled only when two-thirds baked, and the entry is emphatic about it: filling before baking, it says, spoils both the taste and the appearance of the tartlets.
- Bread crust as a blind-baking weightA crust of bread in each shell served the purpose now filled by baking beans or a foil-and-rice parcel. The recipe treats pricking two or three holes in the base as an equivalent alternative; in practice modern cooks find docking alone less reliable with puff paste.
- TimingAbout fifteen minutes total at that heat, split roughly ten minutes empty and five with the jam in. Watch the edges rather than the clock; small shells colour fast.
- CoolingThe recipe insists they be quite cold before serving; hot jam is close to boiling sugar. The ornamenting comes after cooling.
- YieldHalf a pound (225g) of pastry; the recipe says only that this makes "a moderate-sized dish" of tartlets, which at a quarter-inch thickness is likely to be around a dozen, with a spoonful of jam in each.
- Cost"1d. each" is one old penny, twelve to the shilling.
Jam tartlets were the domestic end of a long English tradition of small enclosed pastries, and by the late nineteenth century sugar was cheap and commercial jam widely sold in jars. Sending small pastries to table piled on a dish covered with a white napkin was ordinary Victorian service.