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Cream Confiture, for Pies and Tarts
1 pint of cream. 10 eggs 1 pint of red currant jelly. Warm the jelly enough to just melt it and beat into it the eggs and cream. Bake in thin puff-paste crusts. Powdered sugar over when done.
A baked custard tart in the French manner, written for a professional who already knew how to line a tin. The proportions are extremely rich and the method depends entirely on temperature control.
- The hinge: melt the jelly, do not heat itWarm the currant jelly only until it slackens and pours, then let it cool to blood heat before the eggs go in. Jelly hot enough to steam will set the eggs into threads that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- Strain before fillingCurrant jelly rarely melts perfectly clean and ten eggs will always yield some chalaza. Pass the whole mixture through a fine sieve into a jug before pouring into the shells.
- Egg proportionTen eggs to a pint of cream is a high proportion of egg, though the pint of jelly thins the mixture considerably; and eggs of the period are generally thought to have run smaller than a modern large egg. Eight large eggs to two cups of cream gives a closer approximation of the intended set; as written it will be dense and sliceable rather than creamy.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none and assumes the pastry cook's judgment. Bake at around 325F. Much above 350F the custard is apt to curdle, weep and pinhole even under puff paste, and puff paste of any real thinness will take colour fast at that heat.
- Blind-bake the crustsThe recipe does not say whether the shells are baked first, but a wet custard poured into raw puff paste gives a sodden base. Bake them out three-quarters, then fill.
- Judging doneThe centre should still shiver when the tin is nudged, around 170-175F on a thermometer. Carryover finishes the set. A filling that is firm all the way across in the oven has already gone past.
- Currant jellyReal redcurrant jelly, tart and firmly set, not a sweetened currant jam or a grape jelly substitute. The acid is what keeps a pint of cream and ten eggs from tasting merely of custard, and jam will bring seeds and pulp into what should be a smooth cream.
- YieldA pint of cream, a pint of jelly and ten eggs makes roughly a quart and a half of filling, enough for two or three 9-inch tarts or a good number of individual ones. The recipe dusts the powdered sugar over 'when done'; letting them cool first will keep it from dissolving into the surface.
Confiture is simply the French word for a preserve, and here it names not the jelly itself but the finished cream set with it — the sort of borrowing from French professional vocabulary that fills trade cookbooks, whose kitchens took their organisation and much of their menu language from Paris. Redcurrant jelly served as much for glazing, saucing and colouring as for spreading. The recipe works in the manner of a baked jelly custard, in which a set fruit preserve rather than fresh fruit supplies both flavour and colour, an approach that made perfect sense in a kitchen working year-round from stores.