Lemon Sticks
Lemon Sticks may be made in same manner as Orange Sticks, using Lemon Filling.
This is a one-line variant that only works if you have the parent recipe in front of you. Everything of substance lives in the Orange Sticks entry and in the book's Lemon Filling.
- Find the parent recipe firstNothing here tells you the pastry, the shape or the oven. Look up the Orange Sticks entry and the book's Lemon Filling before starting; this line changes one component and nothing else.
- "Sticks" means strips, not a tartThe name implies narrow fingers of pastry, filled or spread and cut into lengths, rather than a single tart. Cut them narrow enough that a bite does not shatter the whole strip.
- Oven languageThis line gives no oven at all; whatever the parent recipe specifies governs. Older oven terms are usually read as roughly 425-450F for a hot or quick oven, about 350F for moderate and about 300F for slow, but treat these as approximations and watch the pastry.
- Cook the filling properlyCornstarch- or flour-thickened lemon fillings must come to a full boil for a minute or two, stirring, or they taste raw and slacken in the oven. If egg yolk goes in at the end, take the pan off the heat and temper it rather than boiling it again.
- Make the filling thicker than seems rightFilling meant to sit between or on strips of pastry has to hold a shape when hot. A curd that pours is a curd that will run off the edges and burn onto the sheet; it should mound on the spoon.
- LemonsUse fresh juice and the zest of the same fruit. Bottled juice carries a flat, cooked note that is very obvious in a filling this plain. Taste as you go rather than committing to all the sugar at once.
- KeepingFilled pastry strips are at their best within a few hours. The filling steadily softens the pastry, so bake and fill the same day rather than storing them overnight.
This kind of one-line derivative is characteristic of the late-nineteenth-century American cooking-school manuals, in which a recipe is set out once in full and then spun into variants that change a single filling or flavouring. It was an economy of space and of teaching, and it fits a method that treats cooking as a set of standard procedures into which ingredients are slotted rather than as a collection of unrelated dishes. Sticks, fingers and straws of pastry are generally associated with the tea table and the luncheon, where small sweet things eaten without a fork were the point.