Nutmeg Tart
Nutmeg or canteloupe prepared as above may be made into a tempting tart by lining a baking-dish with a delicate paste, baking, and then filling it with above mixture. Make a meringue with the whipped whites of two eggs and cup of sugar; place over melon, brown quickly in oven, and serve hot or cold.
A short entry that assumes you have just read the preceding melon recipe, and that you already know how to line and blind-bake a shell. A few points fill the gaps.
- "Nutmeg" is a melon, not the spiceA nutmeg melon is an old market name for a small, heavily netted muskmelon, so the recipe is simply offering cantaloupe as the alternative. Any ripe, fragrant orange-fleshed melon works; underripe supermarket cantaloupe will taste of nothing once sugared.
- "Prepared as above"The filling is the melon preparation of the preceding recipe, which is not reprinted here. Melon throws a great deal of water, so cook it until it mounds on a spoon before it goes into the shell, or the pastry will turn to paste.
- "A delicate paste"Plain short pastry, rolled thin. "Lining a baking-dish" means an ordinary pie plate or shallow dish; there is no top crust. The recipe gives no temperature; blind-bake the shell fully -- around 400F is a workable modern equivalent -- since the filling is already cooked and the tart only goes back in long enough to colour the meringue.
- Meringue proportionsA cup of sugar to two whites is heavy even by period standards and will weep and bead. A quarter cup of sugar per white, beaten in gradually once the whites hold soft peaks, gives a meringue that holds.
- "Brown quickly in oven"That means 425-450F for four or five minutes, watched. The trade-off is that a fast brown leaves the interior of the meringue barely warmed; a longer bake at 325F for fifteen minutes sets it through and keeps better if the tart is to be served cold.
- Hot or coldMeringue on a wet fruit filling deteriorates within a few hours and dislikes the refrigerator, where it will slump and puddle. Serve the same day, at room temperature at the latest.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no dish size; two whites' worth of meringue suits roughly a 9-inch tart, six to eight servings.
Melon appears here as a cooked fruit rather than a raw one, a habit with some age to it: nineteenth-century American cookbooks include recipes treating muskmelon much as pumpkin or squash was treated, stewing it with sugar and spice for pies, puddings and preserves, though raw melon was eaten throughout the period as well, and the seed catalogues of the day sold "nutmeg" and "green nutmeg" melons under names often traced to their small, densely netted shape, though the older literature also derives them from the aroma of the spice. Fruit-and-meringue tarts of this kind were a standard way to use a filling that was already sweetened and cooked, and books of the period print them in clusters, each entry leaning on the one before it, which is why this recipe begins mid-thought with "prepared as above." The instruction to serve hot or cold is a reminder that such a tart was as likely to appear at supper or on a sideboard as at the end of dinner.