Cream Tarts
Make them small, of rich paste. Fill them after baking, with whipped cream, and drop a small spot of jelly in each one. The prettiest and most delicate of tarts.--Mrs. M. B. B.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make and blind-bake pastry. The only real technique here is timing: the shells and the cream must not meet until shortly before serving.
- "Rich paste"Most likely a short paste heavy in butter, or a puff paste, rather than a plain pie crust. Any all-butter shortcrust or a sheet of bought puff pastry will do the same work.
- Baking the shells"Fill them after baking" means they go into the oven empty, so line small tart tins and prick or weight the bases. The recipe gives no heat or time; in a modern oven a hot setting of around 400F for roughly 12-15 minutes will dry and colour tartlet shells. A pale, underbaked shell will soften the moment cream goes in.
- "Small"The recipe gives no size. Two to two and a half inches across, one or two bites, is a workable reading; a mini-muffin tin or shallow tartlet tins suit that scale.
- The whipped creamModern heavy or whipping cream (36% fat or higher) whips well; light cream and ultra-pasteurized half-and-half will not. Whip to firm peaks; the recipe does not say whether the cream was sweetened, and sugar can be added lightly to taste.
- The jellyA firm, clear fruit jelly holds its shape better than a soft jam, which will bleed into the cream. Currant jelly was common in Virginia households and is a plausible choice. "A small spot" is all the recipe specifies.
- Assemble lateFilled shells go soggy within an hour or two. Bake the shells ahead, keep them airtight at room temperature, and pipe or spoon the cream in no more than 30 minutes before they go to the table.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough working guide, a pastry batch made with about 1 1/2 cups flour will line something in the range of 18 to 24 small tins, and roughly a cup of cream, whipped, will fill that many.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from a wide circle of Virginia housekeepers, each signed off with initials as this one is -- the book reads as much like a community ledger as a cookbook. Tarts of this kind seem to have belonged to the dessert or supper table rather than the dinner course, and their appeal was largely visual: pale cream against a spot of bright red jelly, arranged on a glass stand. Whipped cream in the 1870s meant work by hand or by machine, beaten with a wire whisk or a syllabub churn over ice, or with the rotary egg beater already in common use by that decade. Currant and quince jellies were presumably common enough in Virginia larders by autumn, and a recipe like this one may well have existed partly to use what was already on the shelf.