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Frangipane Tartlets
Tarts and bouchées Cover fluted patty tins with Puff Paste. Make covers a little larger than patty tins. Bake in a hot oven. Fill with Frangipane Cream. Cover with meringue, and decorate with cherries, angelica, and blanched and browned almonds.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have puff paste and Frangipane Cream from elsewhere in the book. A few of its terms and temperatures need translating.
- Bake the shells emptyThe pastry goes into the oven before the cream, not with it. Filling raw puff paste with a wet custard gives you a soggy, collapsed base; bake the cases through, cool them, then fill.
- "A hot oven"For puff paste this means 425-450F. Puff needs the initial blast to turn its water to steam and lift the layers; a moderate oven melts the butter out before the paste can rise.
- Patty tins and bouchéesPatty tins are small fluted tartlet tins, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches across; a shallow muffin tin will stand in. A bouchée ("mouthful") is the same idea built free-standing from rings of puff paste rather than pressed into a tin.
- Why the covers are cut largerPuff paste shrinks back as it bakes, and the lids have no tin to hold them. Cutting them a little wider than the tins means they still sit over the filled shell once baked.
- Frangipane Cream is not modern frangipaneIn cookbooks of this period Frangipane Cream is generally a stovetop cream flavored with almond, sometimes with crushed macaroons worked in -- not the raw butter-and-almond paste baked in a tart shell that the word usually means now. Look up the book's own cream recipe rather than substituting almond filling.
- Setting the meringueThe recipe does not say how the meringue is finished. Meringue spooned onto a cold filled tartlet needs only a short spell of dry heat -- a hot oven or a broiler watched closely -- until the peaks color. A long bake will slump the pastry beneath.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, used for its green color, is now a specialty item. Candied citron, chopped pistachio, or candied lime peel do the same decorative work.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; make as many shells as your paste will line and cover, and fill from whatever quantity of Frangipane Cream you have. Serve the day they are made -- filled puff softens overnight.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, belongs to the era when American cookbooks were teaching home cooks the vocabulary of the professional French pastry kitchen -- hence the untranslated bouchées and the rereader knows what a patty tin is. The name frangipane is generally traced to the Italian Frangipani family, whose perfume was said to have lent its name to an almond-scented cream; by the nineteenth century French pastry used the word for two different things, a baked almond filling and a milk-and-egg cream flavored with almonds or crushed macaroons, and it is the second sense that Lowney's appears to mean. Cherries, angelica and browned almonds against white meringue were a common finishing scheme of the period.