Fruit Baskets
Bake plain paste over inverted patty pans. Roll paste one-eighth inch thick, and cut in strips one-fourth inch wide. Twist strips in pairs and bake over a one-fourth pound baking-powder box, thus making handles. Fill cases with sliced peaches sprinkled generously with sugar, insert handles, garnish with whipped cream and peach leaves. Strawberries, raspberries, or other fruit may be used in place of peaches.
This is an assembly job rather than a baked dessert: pastry is shaped over things rather than in them, then filled cold. The hinge is timing — the shells and handles must be baked, cooled and kept dry, and the fruit added only just before serving.
- Plain pasteAn unsweetened pie crust, the same dough used for a two-crust pie. Fannie Farmer's plain paste is a lean dough: flour with a considerably smaller proportion of lard or butter, and ice water to bind. Any standard all-butter or lard pie dough works.
- Inverted patty pansPatty pans are small shallow tart tins. Turn them upside down, drape the rolled dough over the outside and trim, so the pastry bakes into a cup shape. The backs of a muffin tin do the same job; prick the dough well and chill it before baking so it does not slump.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes you know this. Blind-bake the shells and handles at 425F for about 10-12 minutes, until set and pale gold. Strips this thin colour fast, so pull the handles first.
- The baking-powder boxA quarter-pound tin of the period was a small cylinder, on the order of two inches across and a little under three inches tall. Any clean can of about that diameter, wrapped in foil and lightly oiled, gives handles with the right arch.
- The handlesEighth-inch dough cut in quarter-inch strips and twisted is fragile once baked. Make several spares, and lift them off the tin only when completely cool. An egg wash before baking gives both colour and a little more strength.
- Peach leavesLike the kernels, contain cyanogenic compounds and are not food. If you use them at all, treat them strictly as decoration set on the plate, not in the fruit, and remove them before eating. Mint or a fresh peach slice does the same visual work.
- Assemble lateSugared sliced peaches throw off juice within minutes and will soften the pastry. Sugar the fruit separately, drain it, and fill the cases at the table or immediately before they go out.
- YieldThe book gives no yield. A single-crust quantity of paste makes a small number of baskets with handles; count on one per person, and they do not keep once filled.
Fruit baskets belong to the decorative end of the American pastry repertoire that the Boston Cooking-School book codified in the 1890s — dishes meant to look composed on a supper or luncheon table, with whipped cream and leaves supplied as garnish in the same breath as the filling. The technique of baking pastry over a form rather than in one is older than the book and shows up wherever cooks wanted a free-standing case; what dates this version is the mould. A quarter-pound baking-powder box was a fixture of the American kitchen shelf after chemical leavening became a household staple in the second half of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period sometimes pressed the empty tins into service as forms. The instruction to substitute strawberries or raspberries is the practical note: the shells keep, the fruit is whatever the season gives you.