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Transparent Pie Mixture
Used also for puffs and tarts, variously flavored. 1/2 pound of sugar. 1/2 pound of butter. 8 eggs.
Nutmeg or vanilla flavor and brandy, if desired.
Melt and stir the butter and sugar together in a sauce pan; add the eggs, beaten a little first, and stir the mixture over the fire till it is half-cooked, ropes from the spoon, and looks like soft butter. If for puffs or tartlets it may be well cooked and flavored with orange or lemon. For pies, dredge a little powdered sugar over the top of the mixture when in the crusts--helps to prevent scorching on top. Slow oven. Makes 4 or 5 pies. The French name for tarts or little pies, made with the preceding mixture and several variations of it, is darioles. Young Quentin Durward, of Scott's novel, on his first arrival in France, is set down to a feast of a choice order, and is served with darioles in the second course. One English definition of dariole is a custard tart. But the nearest the English cooks could come to fitting it with a term was to call it a cheesecake. Neither term is appropriate. The following, one of the dariole fillings, is called in one place "cheesecake to keep several years." Although containing eggs, the keeping qualities of these preparations are such as to entitle them to be called conserves.
This is a butter-and-egg curd baked in pastry — essentially the filling for a transparent or chess pie, cooked partway on the stove before it goes into the shell. The stovetop stage is the whole recipe; get it right and the baking is straightforward.
- The hinge: cook to a rope, not to a scrambleYou are making a curd, and it will curdle if it goes much above 170F. Keep the pan over low heat, stir constantly, and pull it the moment it thickens enough to fall from the spoon in a ribbon. Straining the half-cooked mixture through a sieve before filling the crusts costs nothing and saves any small threads of set egg.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of sugar is about 1 1/8 cups granulated; half a pound of butter is two sticks. The high proportion of butter probably helps the filling set soft rather than firm.
- Eight eggsEgg sizes were not standardised, and period eggs may have run a little smaller than today's large. Seven large eggs, or about 350 g of beaten whole egg, is a reasonable reading, though eight as written is defensible.
- "Slow oven"Roughly 300 to 325F. The filling is mostly egg and will souffle up and then crack if pushed hotter; the dredge of powdered sugar over the top is the book's own guard against scorching. Bake until the centre is just set with a slight wobble.
- YieldFour or five pies from this quantity means shallow nineteenth-century tart tins. In modern 9-inch pans the mixture will fill one deep pie or two shallow ones, or a dozen or more small tartlet shells.
- Blind-bake the shellsA wet egg filling entering a raw crust in a 300F oven will not crisp the bottom. Partially bake the pastry first, then fill.
- The flavouringsNutmeg was grated fresh from the whole seed; a rounded quarter teaspoon is plenty for the batch. Brandy or a tablespoon of vanilla extract goes in after the pan comes off the heat, since both cook off. For the puff and tartlet version, zest is safer than juice, which thins the mixture and can encourage a hot egg mixture to curdle.
- Ignore the keeping claimThe closing remark about "cheesecake to keep several years" and calling these conserves reflects a kitchen with no refrigeration and a high tolerance for risk. A butter-and-egg curd is a perishable custard. Refrigerate the baked pies and eat them within three or four days.
Transparent pie belongs to the same family as chess pie, vinegar pie and Kentucky transparent tart — sugar, butter and eggs baked in pastry, a formula that made a dessert out of pantry staples when fruit was out of season. The author's digression is worth following: dariole is the old French term for a small filled pastry, and it survives today mainly as the name of the little cylindrical mould rather than the thing baked in it. The Quentin Durward reference is to Walter Scott's 1823 novel, set in fifteenth-century France, where the young Scot's introduction to French cookery serves as a shorthand for luxury — the kind of literary flourish a cookbook writer liked to attach to a dish to give it standing. The complaint that English cooks could only render dariole as "cheesecake" is fair enough: in older English usage cheesecake covered almost any sweet curd baked in pastry, whether or not cheese was anywhere near it.