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Cheese Tartlets
Ingredients to make fourteen.
One gill of White Sauce.
Two ounces of Parmesan Cheese.
This is an ingredient note rather than a full method — the pastry, the seasoning and the finishing are all assumed knowledge in a book written for cooks who had made tartlets a hundred times. What follows fills in the parts the original leaves out.
- A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint: 5 fl oz, about 142 ml. American readers should note their own gill is 4 fl oz, so the difference is real if you are scaling.
- White sauceRead this as a béchamel made stiff — roughly 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour to the gill of milk. A pouring sauce will soak the pastry and slump; the filling should hold a soft peak on the spoon before the cheese goes in.
- The cheeseTwo ounces is about 55 g, finely grated. Stir it into the sauce off the heat so it melts without splitting. No seasoning is specified; salt, white pepper and a little cayenne suit the dish, and cayenne turns up often in recipes for small cheese savouries.
- What is missingFourteen small tartlets need about 8 oz (225 g) of shortcrust or trimmings of puff paste, rolled thin and lined into 2-inch patty tins. The original specifies no oven; in a modern one, bake them blind at around 400F until dry and pale gold, then fill.
- Binding and browningSome versions of this filling take a beaten egg yolk stirred in at the end, the tartlets being returned to a hot oven or passed under a salamander for two or three minutes to puff and colour. A grill on its highest setting does the same work.
- Serve at onceCheese tartlets collapse and go leathery as they cool. They are meant to reach the table hot from the fire, and there is no useful way to hold them.
- YieldFourteen tartlets — as a savoury course that is seven to fourteen people, one or two apiece, not a main dish.
Cheese tartlets belong to the savoury, the small hot dish served near the end of a formal late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner, after the sweet and before dessert fruit — a British course that French chefs are often said to have found baffling, and one that faded through the first half of the twentieth century. Its stock in trade was cheese, anchovy, bone marrow, soft roes and devilled trimmings, all in miniature: ramekins, cheese straws, croûtes, and tartlets like these. Parmesan was a common grating cheese in the professional English kitchen well before it was a supermarket staple, valued because it kept, grated dry, and browned without turning oily. The bare-bones form of this entry — two ingredients and a yield, no method — suggests a book in which the pastry and the béchamel were taught elsewhere.