Peach Tarts
Cook two cups peaches cut in eighths, one cup sugar, one tablespoon lemon juice, one tablespoon butter, and a few grains salt, until peaches are tender. Cool and fill tarts.
A compote in all but name, cooked down and spooned into shells that were baked separately. Nearly everything hinges on how much liquid you drive off before filling.
- Tarts means the shellsThe recipe assumes you already have small pastry shells baked blind and cooled, as period books took for granted. Fill them shortly before serving or the crust softens.
- Cook it dry, then reduceAdd no water. The sugar draws juice from the fruit within a few minutes over low heat; once the peaches are tender, lift them out and boil the syrup down until it coats a spoon, then recombine. Filling straight from the pan will flood the pastry.
- Peel firstThe recipe says only 'cut in eighths' and does not specify peeling. Two cups of peeled, sliced peaches is roughly 3 medium peaches, about 1 lb whole. Blanch 30 seconds and the skins slip off; unpeeled slices can leave leathery curls in the finished filling.
- A few grains saltA pinch, no more than 1/8 teaspoon. It is there to sharpen the sugar, which at one cup to two cups of fruit is a heavy proportion by modern dessert standards, though short of a true 1:1 jam ratio by weight.
- Adjust the sugar to the fruitA full cup to two cups of fruit is generous by modern taste. With ripe summer fruit, two-thirds of a cup is closer to balanced, and the lemon juice does real work rather than decorative.
- YieldAbout one and a half cups of filling after reduction, enough for six 3-inch tarts or one 8-inch shallow shell.
- ServingA spoonful of whipped cream, or a meringue browned briefly, suits it, though the recipe itself specifies neither. The filling is served cool, not chilled.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of the many house cookbooks that firms issued to keep their product in domestic circulation. Its dessert chapter, unsurprisingly, leans heavily on cocoa, which makes the plain fruit entries like this one useful as a baseline: no chocolate, no gelatine, no cornstarch, just fruit cooked with sugar until it holds. Small filled pastries had been called tarts in English since the medieval period, and by the early twentieth century the American sense had narrowed to what this recipe assumes — an individual open shell, baked empty, filled after the fact. The technique of cooking fruit with a heavy dose of sugar and no added water is closer to preserving than to pie-making, and reflects a kitchen in which peaches arrived in quantity for a few weeks a year and were dealt with fast.