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Lai Yut
Make a pastry dough, using rice flour. Roll dough out, brush it with whites of two beaten eggs. Fold dough over several times, each time brushing with egg. Then roll dough out again like cookie dough, and cut into rounds. Make a filling of 2 cups lychee nuts stoned and mashed to a pulp, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1 teaspoon mixed spices and 1 cup crystallized limes, all mixed. Put filling into the dough placed in tart shells. Bake.
A sweet lychee tart written in the shorthand of its period: no pastry quantities, no oven setting, no yield. The filling is the part worth attention, since fresh lychee carries far more water than the recipe assumes.
- Cook the filling firstTwo cups of mashed lychee with a cup and a half of sugar will weep badly in a tart shell. Cook the fruit and sugar down in a pan until thick and jammy, then cool completely before filling.
- Lychee "nuts"These are the fruit, not a nut. Fresh lychees need peeling and the single large seed removed; canned lychees in syrup should be drained well and patted dry, and drained fruit needs less added sugar than the recipe gives.
- Crystallized limesCandied limes, whole or sliced. Candied citrus peel is the nearest general substitute; chop it fine so it distributes through the pulp.
- Mixed spicesProbably a household blend along the lines of cinnamon, clove, ginger and nutmeg, though five-spice is possible in a Chinese-influenced kitchen. One teaspoon in this quantity of filling is assertive either way.
- Rice flour doughRice flour has no gluten, so the folding and egg-white brushing will not laminate the way it would with wheat pastry, and the dough tears easily. Either accept a short, crumbly crust, or work in glutinous rice flour (also gluten-free, but stickier and more cohesive) or some wheat flour for a dough that holds together when rolled and folded.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Small filled tarts of this kind bake at 375F for roughly 20 to 25 minutes, until the pastry is set and just colouring at the edges; a rice-flour crust browns reluctantly, so judge by firmness.
- ShellsThe instruction is to line small tart tins with the rounds, then fill. Rounds of about 3 inches suit a standard tartlet or mini-muffin tin.
- YieldThe filling as written is generous, enough for roughly 18 to 24 small tarts. It keeps a few days refrigerated if you bake in batches.
The name is usually read as a transliteration of a Cantonese term for lychee, the fruit English-speakers long called the lychee nut -- commonly explained by its having reached them dried, with a hard brown shell that looked nothing like fresh fruit. The rice-flour pastry and the crystallized limes point to genuine Chinese grocery ingredients, while the tart tins and the folded, egg-brushed dough are Western pastry habits laid over them.