Lemon Tartlets
Bake plain paste over inverted patty pan. Fill with Lemon Pie II mixture, cover with Meringue II, and bake until meringue is delicately browned.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: Farmer expects you to already have her plain paste, her Lemon Pie II filling and her Meringue II to hand. Everything that can go wrong here is in the shell and the meringue.
- Patty pan, invertedA patty pan is a small shallow tin, roughly muffin-cup to 3-inch tart size. Draping the pastry over the outside of an upturned tin bakes a free-standing cup with no filling to weigh it down; a modern equivalent is the back of a muffin tray or an inverted popover pan. Prick the pastry and chill it before baking so it does not slump off the tin.
- Blind-bake temperatureThe recipe gives none. A hot oven, around 425F for 10-12 minutes, until set and pale gold, suits an empty shell. Because there is nothing inside, it colours fast and cannot be rescued once dark.
- Getting them off the tinLet the shells cool for a minute or two on the tin, then lift them straight up. Left to cool completely they grip, and thin pastry cracks when you twist it free.
- Lemon Pie II fillingFarmer's lemon fillings of this type are starch-thickened and cooked with egg yolks rather than poured raw into the shell. Cook the filling until it thickens and boils briefly so the starch loses its raw taste, then fill the shells while it is still warm.
- Meringue IIIn this book Meringue II is the more heavily sweetened of the numbered soft meringues; beat to firm peaks. Spread it so it touches the pastry rim all the way round, which anchors it and stops it sliding off as it sets.
- "Delicately browned" means a numberThe book gives none. Around 12-15 minutes at 350F browns the tips and gives the meringue time to set through; a very short blast in a very hot oven colours the surface while leaving the interior slack, which is commonly blamed for weeping.
- Warm filling, cool kitchenMeringue put onto cold filling tends to seep a layer of syrup underneath. Top the tartlets while the lemon mixture is still warm, and serve them the day they are made -- filled shells go soft overnight.
- YieldThe original gives none. A standard single-crust quantity of plain paste will line roughly eight 3-inch tartlet shells; scale the filling and meringue to suit.
Lemon meringue in this form was helped along by two nineteenth-century conveniences: cheap refined sugar and cornstarch, which let cooks thicken an acidic lemon filling without relying on eggs alone, though flour and eggs alone served as well. Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is built on exactly the cross-referencing you see here -- numbered pastes, numbered meringues, numbered fillings, recombined into new dishes with a single line of text -- which was part of the book's argument that cooking could be taught as a system of components rather than a collection of family recipes. The inverted-tin trick for tartlet shells was one of several ways to get a crisp shell that could sit on a sideboard waiting to be filled; beans or rice used as weights were long established as another. Tartlets like these are often said to have belonged to the tea table and the ladies' luncheon, where a slice of pie would have been considered too substantial.