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Polish Tartlets (Roll puff or plain paste)
Roll puff or plain paste one-eighth inch thick, and cut in two and one-half inch squares; wet the corners, fold toward the centre, and press lightly; bake on a sheet; when cool, press down the centres and fill, using two-thirds quince marmalade and one-third currant jelly.
A two-line pastry that assumes you already know how to handle puff paste. The whole dish stands or falls on the pastry rising evenly around a depression that holds the jam.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Modern equivalents: puff paste wants a hot oven, roughly 425-450F for 10-15 minutes, until the layers are set and pale gold; plain paste (a short crust) is happier at about 400F for 12 minutes.
- Puff paste vs. plain paste"Puff paste" is a laminated butter dough of many turns; "plain paste" is the book's basic pie crust with lard or butter cut in. A sheet of commercial all-butter puff pastry rolled to an eighth of an inch stands in perfectly well.
- Cutting and foldingTwo-and-a-half-inch squares, corners moistened with water and folded to the centre, give you four points meeting in the middle. Press only lightly: crushing the cut edges glues the layers shut and the pastry will not lift.
- "Bake on a sheet"A flat baking sheet, not a tart pan. Line it with parchment and chill the cut shapes for 15-20 minutes before baking so the butter is firm going into the oven.
- Pressing the centresThe original says to do this when cool. If a cooled shell proves too brittle, press while the tartlets are still warm and pliable, using the back of a small spoon to make a well, then let them cool completely before filling.
- Quince marmaladeNot orange marmalade. This is quince cooked down to a thick, deep-pink paste, close to Spanish membrillo or Latin American dulce de membrillo, which can be substituted after warming and beating it smooth. Quince jelly is too loose; the filling needs to hold a shape.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, a common tart-sweet jelly of the period and still widely available. Its acidity is doing real work against the heavy quince -- do not swap in grape or apple.
- Filling proportion and yieldTwo parts quince marmalade to one part currant jelly by volume, warmed together and stirred until uniform, then cooled to just spreadable. A single 10-inch square sheet of pastry yields about sixteen tartlets, each taking roughly two teaspoons of filling.
- TimingFill on the day of serving. The jelly draws moisture from the pastry within a few hours and a crisp shell turns soft and leathery overnight.
Nineteenth-century American and English cookbooks seem to have used "Polish" for small folded or fluted pastries much as they used "Vienna" for enriched bread -- a loose gesture at Central European baking rather than a documented origin, and the tartlet is not, so far as anyone has shown, a recipe you will find under that name in Polish sources. What it does show clearly is how puff paste was worked in a well-equipped 1896 kitchen: paste rolled thin, cut into small shapes and baked plain, with the filling added at the last moment to keep the layers crisp. The quince marmalade is the period detail. Quinces were common in American kitchen gardens and, being high in pectin and inedible raw, were generally cooked down to a stiff paste or jelly; by the mid-twentieth century the trees are said to have become much scarcer and the marmalade with them, which is why this filling now reads as exotic and once read as thrift.