Almond Tartlets
INGREDIENTS for 1 doz. tartlets.-4 oz. of butter, 4 oz. of pounded sugar, the rind and juice of 2 lemons, 3 eggs, puff paste. AVERAGE Cost, 1s. 3d.
ALMOND TARTLETS.
Set the butter in the oven to oil, beat the eggs well, grate the peel of the lemon, and squeeze and strain the juice.
Add the sugar to the beaten eggs, then the lemon-peeland juice, lastly the butter, and stir well together. Line some patty pans with paste, and fill about half full with the mixture, and bake in a quick oven.
TIME.-About 20 minutes to bake the tartlets.
SEASONABLE at any time.
This is a baked lemon curd in puff paste, despite the title — the mixture as printed contains no almonds at all. Treat it as lemon cheesecakes, the Victorian name for exactly this filling.
- The missing almondsMrs Beeton's almond tartlet and almond cheesecake recipes elsewhere are built on pounded sweet almonds, sometimes with a flavouring water; this ingredient list has none. If you want the almond version, work 3-4 oz of ground almonds into the mixture and expect a denser, less curd-like filling.
- Weights4 oz butter is one US stick (115 g); 4 oz pounded sugar is a scant 2/3 cup of caster sugar. Pounded sugar means loaf sugar crushed fine, so caster or superfine is the closest equivalent, not granulated.
- "Set the butter in the oven to oil"This means melt it to a clear liquid without browning. Do it in a small pan over low heat and let it cool to barely warm before it goes in, or the eggs will scramble on contact.
- OvenA quick oven is usually reckoned at about 400-450F. For a curd filling in puff paste, start at 425F to set and lift the pastry, and if the tops are colouring before the centres set, drop to 375F for the last few minutes.
- Patty pansShallow tartlet tins about 2.5 inches across, or a standard 12-hole bun tray. Line with puff paste rolled thin; the pastry is not blind-baked here, so keep it thin or the base stays pale and soft.
- Half full, and mean itThe mixture rises and can boil over the rim, welding the tartlets into the tin. Half full is the instruction that matters most.
- DonenessTwenty minutes is about right, but judge by the filling: it should be puffed, just set at the centre, and no longer liquid when the tin is tilted. It sinks slightly and firms as it cools.
- Yield and servingTwelve small tartlets. Best the day they are made, at room temperature; refrigeration softens the puff paste.
Fillings of this kind — butter, sugar, eggs and lemon baked in a pastry case — were often called lemon cheesecakes in English kitchens, the term "cheesecake" being traditionally said to have covered rich curd tarts more broadly. The recipe is essentially lemon curd cooked in its crust rather than in a pan, and it is generally traced to a long line of English "cheesecake" and "maid of honour" recipes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of which the almond version, thickened with pounded sweet almonds, is often described as the grander cousin. This page carries the almond title while listing no almonds. What is well documented is what happened to Household Management after Isabella Beeton's death in 1865: the book was reissued, expanded and re-cut by successive editors and publishers for decades. The costing of 1s 3d, and the note that the dish is seasonable at any time, are characteristic Beeton apparatus — a household manual written for a mistress budgeting a kitchen, not only for the person standing in it.