Malaga Boats
Roll puff or plain paste one-eighth inch thick, line individual boat-shaped tins, prick, and half fill with rice or barley
The text as printed breaks off mid-sentence: it gives you the shell and the blind-baking weights, but not the filling that gives the dish its name. Treat it as a method for barquette cases, with the grape filling assumed from the title and from the surrounding pages of the Pies chapter.
- The hinge: weight the pastryThe rice or barley is not an ingredient but a blind-baking weight, and the shells are pricked as well so steam cannot lift the base off the tin. Why the tins are only half filled the recipe does not say.
- Boat-shaped tinsThese are barquette or bateau moulds, pointed ovals roughly 3 to 4 inches long. Standard tartlet tins or a mini muffin pan work if you accept round pastries instead of boats.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven direction at all. By modern practice puff paste is baked hot, around 425 to 450F, so the layers set before the butter runs, and plain (short) paste nearer 400F; 10 to 15 minutes, then tip out the grain and give the shells a few more minutes uncovered to dry the interior.
- Paste thicknessAn eighth of an inch is thinner than most modern tart pastry and it matters here: the shells are meant to be brittle and almost weightless under a soft filling.
- Malaga grapesLarge pale muscat table grapes from southern Spain, sold seeded-in and once a common winter luxury in American markets. They are hard to find now; a firm green muscat or thick-skinned seedless white grape gives the right size and perfume, halved lengthwise.
- FinishingFruit boats of this kind are best filled just before serving, the grapes arranged in the cooled shell and glazed with a little melted currant jelly or topped with sweetened whipped cream; filling ahead will soften the pastry.
- YieldA pound of paste rolled this thin lines about 18 to 24 barquette moulds. Reckon two or three per person as a dessert course.
Malaga grapes reached American cities in barrels of cork dust through the late nineteenth century and were a fixture of the winter fruit trade, expensive enough to be worth naming a pastry after. Boat-shaped tins came in with the French patisserie vocabulary that Boston cooking-school teaching drew on in the 1880s and 1890s; timbales and croustades appear in Farmer as vehicles for whatever fruit, cream or salpicon the season offered. The instruction to weight a shell with rice or barley is the same trick still used today.