Lemon Tarts
Chop or grate a lemon; add a cupful white sugar, a cupful water, one egg, one tablespoonful flour. Line small patties with paste, put a spoonful in each and bake.--Mrs. M. B. B.
A whole-lemon tart filling of the kind that predates lemon curd's dominance: peel, pulp and all, bound with a single egg and a spoonful of flour. It is thinner and sharper than a modern lemon tart, and the details below are what stand between it and a tin of leaked syrup.
- The whole lemon"Chop or grate a lemon" means the entire fruit, rind included, not just the juice. Take out every seed, and chop very fine or run it through a grater; large shreds of pith stay bitter and tough through baking.
- Patties"Small patties" are patty pans, shallow tins roughly the size of a modern muffin cup or smaller. Line them with plain shortcrust; a spoonful of filling in each will fill perhaps ten to twelve.
- Paste"Paste" here means ordinary pie pastry, typically made with lard or butter. There is no blind baking here, so keep the shells thin and set the tins on a preheated baking sheet to help the bases cook through.
- OvenThe recipe gives none. Bake at 400F until the pastry is coloured and the filling is set and slightly domed, about 20 to 25 minutes for small tins, then check that the centres no longer wobble.
- The flour is doing all the workOne tablespoonful of flour to a cup of water and one egg is a very light bind. Whisk the flour into the sugar before adding liquid so it does not lump, and expect a filling that is soft-set rather than firm like curd.
- Cup measureCup measures of this period were not standardised, but treating the cupful as roughly 8 fluid ounces for the water and about 7 oz for granulated sugar will serve. The proportions are forgiving; the sugar is what balances the rind.
- OverfillingFill the shells no more than three-quarters. The mixture is thin going in and rises as the egg sets, and anything that boils over the rim welds the tart to the tin.
- ServingCool in the tins for a few minutes before lifting out, or the soft centres tear. Best the day they are made, while the pastry is still crisp.
Lemon tarts of this sort - whole fruit, sugar, an egg and a thickener, baked in small pastry shells - appear in a number of nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and belong to the same family as the shaker-style lemon pie that uses sliced fruit macerated in sugar, though no direct line of descent can be traced. Marion Cabell Tyree's Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housewives, and many entries are signed with initials only; brevity is the general style, the intended reader being assumed to know what paste was and how hot her stove ran. Lemons themselves were an imported luxury but a reliably available one in the Atlantic ports, shipped up from the Caribbean and Mediterranean, and using the entire fruit rather than the juice alone was ordinary thrift on the part of a cook who had paid for it.