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Meringues (Reto keep pastry in desired)
Reto keep pastry in desired shape. Bake in a hot oven. move from tins and cover bottom of boats with marmalade, and on marmalade arrange three or four malaga grapes cooked in syrup five minutes. For the syrup boil one-half cup, each, sugar and water, five minutes.
Calvė Tarts Roll puff or plain paste one-eighth inch thick, and cut in rounds of correct size to cover inverted circular tins. Cover tins with paste, prick several times, and bake until delicately browned. Place one-half a canned peach in each case and fill each cavity with one-half a blanched Jordan almond.
Two small pastry conceits from the pie chapter: shallow paste "boats" finished with marmalade and syruped grapes, and round shells baked over inverted tins and filled with canned peach and almond. Both rely on baking the paste empty and filling it only when cool.
- Bake the shells blind and dryThe whole point of covering an inverted tin is that the paste cannot slump. Prick it well, and if puff paste blisters, press it back with the tip of a knife in the first few minutes of baking.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; a hot oven of this period is conventionally read as somewhere around 425-450F. Puff paste wants the hotter end. Watch a small shell rather than trusting a time: it is done when delicately browned.
- Boat tinsThe recipe says only "boats," i.e. small boat-shaped moulds of the kind sold as barquette tins, typically a few inches long. Small tartlet tins or the bottom of a mini muffin pan work; whatever you use, chill the lined tins before baking.
- Fill only when coldMarmalade or syrup on a warm shell will soak through within minutes. Cool the pastry completely on a rack, then fill as close to serving as you can manage.
- Malaga grapesLarge pale table grapes, once a staple of the fruit stand. Any firm seedless green grape stands in. Five minutes in the syrup is enough to gloss them; longer and they wrinkle and weep.
- The syrupEqual parts sugar and water, half a cup each, boiled five minutes, gives a thin syrup that leaves the grapes glossy rather than glazed. It makes more than enough for the three or four grapes per boat that the recipe calls for.
- Jordan almondsHere this means the plain large Spanish almond, blanched — not the modern candy-coated sweet. Blanch whole almonds in boiling water for a minute and slip the skins off.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of paste, so the yield depends entirely on how much you roll out and the size of your tins.
Filled pastry shells of this kind belong to the late nineteenth-century fashion for cold, composed desserts assembled from a pantry of prepared parts: baked cases, a sugar syrup, canned fruit, marmalade, blanched nuts. They suited a household with one oven, which could bake the cases in the morning and fill them before serving, and they depended on canned fruit and imported almonds being available from the grocer. The boat shape takes its name from the French barquette, and the trick of baking paste over an inverted mould rather than inside one long predates modern pie weights; it is still the quickest way to get a crisp, evenly browned little shell.