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Flour Mixtures Continued: Pastry and Pies: Tarts
CANNED PINEAPPLE FILLING To a pint can of grated pineapple add half a cup of sugar and the juice of half a lemon; let simmer until thick, then use as above. PEACH TARTS Cover inverted individual tins with pastry (it will take but a small piece for two tins, a little "left over" will answer). Set the tins on a pie tin to keep the edge of the paste from the oven. Prick the paste all over with a fork and let bake. It will take about eight minutes. Remove the pastry from the tins and set it onto individual plates. Put a canned peach in each piece of pastry. Pipe whipped cream above and sprinkle the cream with fine-chopped pistachio nuts. Or fill the hollow spaces in the center and around the peach with jelly or marmalade and put a blanched almond in the center of the peach. Serve with the syrup from the peaches as a sauce. Halves of apple, cooked in syrup (sugar and water, half a cup of each, cooked six minutes), may replace the peaches. STRAWBERRY TARTS, ST. HONORE STYLE Bake the pastry over inverted tins as for "peach tarts." Remove from the tin and half fill with St. Honore cream, then finish filling with strawberries cut in halves and mixed with sugar.
ST. HONORE CREAM 1/2 cup of milk 1/8 teaspoonful of salt 1/4 cup of sugar 1 egg 3 tablespoonfuls of flour Scald the milk over hot water; sift the sugar, salt and flour together and stir into the hot milk; let cook ten minutes, then add the egg, beaten very light. To add the egg dilute it with a little of the hot mixture, then stir into the rest of the mixture.
APPLE TARTS Make the pastry by the recipe, "Pastry for One Pie," and roll this into a rectangular sheet. Have ready one-fourth a cup of creamed butter. Spread this over the pastry or put it on, here and there, in little bits. Then roll up the pastry as a jelly roll. Pat and roll this into a sheet, and cut out into rounds. With the small end of a pastry tube cut out three small rounds from half the rounds of pastry. Have ready some stewed-and-sifted apples, cooked dry, seasoned with sugar, a little salt and nutmeg, and chilled. Put a teaspoonful of this sauce in the center of the plain rounds, and brush the edge of one after another with cold water; put a round with holes in it over the apple sauce, and press the edges together closely. Brush the edges with cold water and the top with slightly beaten white of egg. Dredge lightly with granulated sugar, and bake until slightly colored.
A cluster of small tart ideas built on one technique: pastry baked over the backs of tins so it holds a bowl shape, then filled cold. Nothing here is difficult, but the book assumes you know oven temperatures and how far to cook a pastry cream.
- The hinge: bake the shells over inverted tinsDraping pastry over the outside of upturned muffin or tartlet tins gives a free-standing cup with no lining, weights or shrinkage into the pan. Prick it thoroughly so it does not balloon, and set the tins on a sheet pan as instructed so the overhanging edges are not directly exposed to the oven floor.
- Oven temperatureNone is given anywhere on the page. The eight minutes stated for the shells implies a hot oven; the filled and sealed apple tarts, baked only "until slightly colored," will want a moderate oven and longer, but the book offers no guidance and any figure is a modern guess.
- A pint can of pineappleAbout 16 fl oz, rather less than the modern 20 oz can of crushed pineapple, so scale the sugar and lemon accordingly. Drain off some juice before simmering or the filling takes a long time to thicken; you want it jam-like and spreadable, not runny.
- Finish the St. Honore cream on the heatThe book adds the beaten egg at the end and stops. A flour-thickened pastry cream needs a further two minutes of cooking after the egg goes in, stirring constantly, both to bring the egg to a safe temperature and to destroy the enzyme in raw yolk that will thin the cream as it stands. Chill it covered before filling the shells.
- Fill only at the last minuteBlind-baked shells this thin soften quickly once cream or syrup goes in. Bake ahead, keep the shells in a tin, and assemble as you serve.
- The apple tarts are a rough puffSpreading creamed butter over rolled pastry, rolling it up like a jelly roll and re-rolling is a quick lamination. Keep the butter and dough cold and work fast, or the butter blends in and you lose the flake. The three small holes cut with a piping tube are steam vents, not decoration alone.
- Apple sauce must be dry and coldStewed and sifted apples cooked down until they hold their shape, then chilled. Wet or warm filling makes the seams open in the oven.
- YieldThe book states no yield. From the quantities given, the St. Honore cream makes roughly three-quarters of a cup; the pastry note simply observes that a small piece, or a little left over, will cover two tins.
St. Honore cream takes its name from the gateau St-Honore, the Parisian pastry whose name is variously traced to the patron saint of bakers and to the rue Saint-Honore, where Chiboust's shop stood; in French practice the cream is a pastry cream lightened with beaten egg white or whipped cream, and by the time it reached American home cookbooks it had been simplified to the plain flour-and-egg custard given here. The whole page is a portrait of the early twentieth-century canned-goods pantry: canned pineapple, canned peaches in syrup, marmalade and jelly, all of them things a small household could keep on a shelf and turn into a dessert without a fruit season to wait for. Cooking for Two belongs to a wave of books aimed at couples and small apartment households, where the challenge was not grandeur but scale, hence the instruction to use the pastry left over from something else and the insistence that a very small piece will do.