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Strawberry Tartlets
It often happens that you have among the strawberries a quantity that are not quite good enough to be sent to table as desert, and yet not enough to make jam of. Put these strawberries on to heat, with some brown sugar, and use them to fill small pastry tartlets. Pastry cases can be bought for very little at the confectioner's. Cover the top of the tartlet when the strawberry conserve is cold with whipped cream.
Madeira Eggs or CEufs a la Grand'mere Break the yolk of an egg in a basin and be sure that it is very fresh; beat it up, adding a little powdered it powdered sugar, and then, drop by drop, enough of the best Madeira to give it a strong flavor. This makes a nice sweet served in glass cups and it is besides very good for sore throats.
Two separate items were run together on this page: a thrifty strawberry tartlet, which is straightforward, and a raw-egg Madeira custard that is not. The caution above applies to the second.
- Why the Madeira eggs failA raw yolk beaten with sugar and fortified wine is never heated at any point, and the alcohol in Madeira is nowhere near enough to make an egg safe. Uncooked yolk carries a real Salmonella risk, and this was recommended for people already ill with sore throats, exactly the readers least able to tolerate it. Use a current recipe for a cooked custard or zabaglione instead.
- The strawberriesThe recipe says only that these are berries not good enough to send to table as dessert; presumably soft or blemished fruit rather than presentable whole ones. Mouldy or fermenting berries are a different thing entirely and should be discarded, not cooked.
- Brown sugarBrown sugar of the period was not necessarily the same product as modern dark brown sugar; light brown is probably the closer match in flavour. The recipe gives no quantity: about 2 oz (a scant 1/3 cup) per pound of fruit is a reasonable starting point, adjusted to the sweetness of the berries.
- "Put these on to heat"This is a short conserve, not jam, as the recipe itself notes. Cook uncovered over moderate heat until the juices run and thicken slightly -- perhaps 8-10 minutes -- then cool completely, since a loose filling will soak into the pastry.
- Bought pastry casesThe book takes for granted a confectioner selling ready-baked cases cheaply; it does not say what kind. Ready-made tartlet cases from a bakery or supermarket serve the same purpose, as does home-made blind-baked shortcrust.
- Assembly and timingAdd the whipped cream when the conserve is cold, as the recipe instructs, and serve soon afterwards; filled tartlets will not hold well for long.
- YieldA pound of strawberries reduced this way fills roughly 10 to 12 small tartlet cases.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled during the First World War from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees in Britain, and its instinct is relentlessly thrifty: this entry exists not because anyone craved strawberry tartlets but because a cook had fruit too soft for the dessert dish and too little of it for a jam pan. The assumption that pastry cases can simply be bought "for very little at the confectioner's" is a glimpse of an urban food economy in which the baker, not the home kitchen, supplied the pastry, and the household supplied only the filling. The second item, egg beaten with sugar and Madeira, belongs to a long European family of invalid cookery -- egg flip, caudle, zabaglione -- in which yolk enriched with wine was treated as both a sweet and a medicine; the name oeufs a la grand'mere is a conventional French menu term for the homely, old-fashioned style, though it is often read as marking the dish a grandmother's remedy rather than a chef's.