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Fairy Creams
Bake Line patty pans with good paste. Fill half full with red raspberries, fresh or preserved. Sprinkle on each a pinch of sugar and Five Roses flour. Bake and let cool. Before serving heap full with whipped cream. These are delicious. -Miss Nellie Barclay, Thamesville, Ont.
A one-line tart from a book built on brevity: pastry shells, a spoonful of raspberries, whipped cream at the last moment. Most of what a modern cook needs is the detail the original leaves out.
- "Bake Line"The stray "Bake" at the start of the line appears to be a transcription or typesetting error; the instruction is simply to line the patty pans with pastry, and the direction to bake comes later in the recipe.
- Patty pansSmall shallow tartlet tins, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches across, or a 12-cup muffin tin used shallowly. "Good paste" means a plain short crust of flour, fat, salt and cold water.
- Oven heatSmall pastry shells with fruit in them want a hot oven, about 400-425F, for 15 to 20 minutes, until the crust is set and browned at the edges. A cooler oven leaves the pastry pale and soggy under the fruit.
- The flour mattersThe pinch of flour sprinkled over the berries is a thickener; it binds the juice so the shells do not weep. Five Roses was a hard-wheat flour sold for general household baking, but any all-purpose flour works here, and cornstarch works better if you have it.
- Half full, and no moreBerries collapse and release liquid as they bake. Overfilling means juice over the rim, a stuck tin and no room for the cream.
- Preserved berriesIf you use jam or canned raspberries rather than fresh, drain them well and skip the added sugar, or the filling will boil out.
- Cream at the last minuteWhip to soft peaks, unsweetened or barely sweetened, and heap it on just before the tarts go to the table. Filled shells do not hold long before the pastry softens.
- YieldNot stated. A single batch of short crust using 1 1/2 cups flour lines about 12 small patty pans, with roughly 2 cups of berries and 1 cup of cream to finish them.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed in very large numbers to Canadian households in the early twentieth century, its recipes contributed by women across the country and printed with their names and towns attached -- here Miss Nellie Barclay of Thamesville, Ontario. That format made the book part advertisement and part community cookbook, which is why the flour is named by brand even in a pinch-sized quantity. "Fairy" as a recipe adjective was common in the period for anything small, pale and light -- fairy cakes, fairy gingerbread, fairy butter -- and carries no more meaning than that. The dish itself is a domestic cousin of the raspberry tartlets common in nineteenth-century pastry manuals, reduced to the shortest form that still works.