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Custard Tartlets, or Fan- chonnettes
INGREDIENTS for 12 tartlets. -For the custard, 4 eggs, 1/4 pint of milk, 2 oz. of butter, 2 oz. of pounded sugar, 3 dessertspoonfuls of flour, flavouring to taste; the whites of 2 eggs, a oz. of pounded sugar.
AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Well beat the eggs, stir to them the milk, the butter, which should be beaten to a cream, the sugar, and flour; mix these ingredients well together, put them into a very clean saucepan, and bring them to the simmering point, but do not allow them to Note. This pudding is usually served cold boil. Flavour with essence of vanilla, with fruit tarts.
A stovetop pastry cream poured into baked tartlet shells and finished with a meringue of two whites. The written quantities have some gaps, so read the notes on measures before starting.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe recipe says bring it to the simmering point but not to a boil. Bring it to the first lazy bubbles over medium-low heat, whisking constantly, hold it there a minute so the flour cooks out, then pull it off.
- Milk quantityThe text reads "pint of milk" with the quantity figure lost. For 4 eggs, 2 oz butter and 3 dessertspoons of flour, a full Imperial pint (20 fl oz / 600 ml) gives a pourable custard; half a pint gives something closer to a stiff pastry cream. Judge by consistency rather than the number.
- Sugar for the meringueThe whites are paired with "a oz." of sugar, which has lost its figure. Standard practice for a soft meringue on tartlets is about 1 oz (30 g) of caster sugar per white, so 2 oz total is the safe reading.
- Pounded sugarThis is sugar crushed fine from a loaf, equivalent to today's caster or superfine sugar. Granulated will work in the custard but dissolves poorly in the meringue.
- DessertspoonfulsA dessertspoon is roughly two teaspoons, about 10 ml. Three of them is around 30 ml of flour by volume -- somewhere between half an ounce and an ounce by weight depending on how they are heaped -- a light thickening for a full pint.
- The pastry, which the text assumesTartlet tins lined with puff or short paste and baked blind. The printed text gives no oven direction at all; bake the shells until set, then return the meringue-topped tartlets to a cooler oven for 10-15 minutes to colour and dry the tops without weeping.
- FlavouringVanilla essence is specified; a strip of lemon peel or a bay leaf infused in the warming milk is another period option. Add extract only after the pan is off the heat, or the aroma cooks away.
- Yield and servingTwelve small tartlets, best eaten the day they are made. The custard can be cooked, covered with a disc of buttered paper against a skin, and chilled a day ahead.
Fanchonnette is a French pastry name of the sort English cookery books borrowed wholesale in the nineteenth century, generally traced to Fanchon, a familiar diminutive of Fran\-filled tartlet finished with meringue. Mrs Beeton's household books are full of these paired titles fplain English first, French second f and it is tempting to read them as a sign that the middle-class kitchen she wrote for was expected to produce food that could be announced at table in the idiom of the professional male cooks who ran grand houses and hotels. The average cost of one shilling for a dozen, printed as though it were a fixed fact, reflects one of the book's distinctive features: costing, seasonality and serving numbers set out for a mistress who was managing a budget as much as a menu.