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Honey Tarts (Make pie crust cut out) (II)
Make pie crust; cut out with an oldfashioned tart cutter. If one of these is not available, use rounds of crust with rings of the pastry around the edges.
Bake light brown and fill the center just before using; sprinkle with nuts or whipped cream.
Filling for center: 1 Cup Honey 1/2 Cup Butter or Butter Substitute 1 Egg Lemon Extract, or Juice to Taste Beat honey and butter together, add egg and beat again. Flour and fill tarts.
The shells are baked empty and the filling is beaten together cold, and nothing in the instructions ever brings that filling to heat. That is the problem with this one, and it is not a matter of adjusting a time or a temperature.
- The egg is never cookedThe shells go into the oven empty, are baked light brown, and are filled "just before using." The honey-butter-egg mixture is beaten raw and spooned into a cooled crust, so the egg never reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella. Honey is acidic and hygroscopic but it is not a pasteurising agent, and a filling held at room temperature on a tea table only makes matters worse.
- "Flour and fill tarts" is unrecoverableThis last line is the only hint that the filling might have been meant to be thickened or cooked, and it gives neither a quantity of flour nor a method. There is no way to reconstruct the author's intention from it. A current recipe for a cooked honey curd or a baked honey tart should be used instead.
- Honey and infantsWhatever else is done with it, uncooked honey should never be given to a child under one year old, because of the risk of infant botulism from Clostridium botulinum spores. Baking into a filling does not reliably destroy them either.
- "Butter Substitute"In books of this kind the phrase could cover oleomargarine, lard or vegetable shortening. Margarine was for much of its history sold uncoloured, with colouring worked in at home under state and federal colouring restrictions. Whichever was meant, it was a cost substitution rather than a dietary one.
- Lemon extract vs. juiceThe recipe treats them as interchangeable, but period lemon extract was an alcoholic oil-of-lemon tincture, all aroma and no acid. Juice would have thinned the filling; extract would not.
- The old-fashioned tart cutterA cutter of a type that formed a shell with a raised rim, no longer common. The recipe's own workaround — a round of pastry with a separate ring of pastry laid on the edge — is how such shells are still built by hand.
Honey tarts belong to the long stretch of American home baking in which honey stood in for sugar, and the phrase "Butter or Butter Substitute" points to a period when margarine and other substitutes were on the shelf. Cookbooks of the era carry sections built around honey, corn syrup and molasses. The open tart shell filled at the last moment is older than any of that, a standard of the pastry cook's repertoire, and the instruction to fill "just before using" reflects a real concern that a crisp shell not go soggy on the sideboard. What the recipe does not reflect is any concern about the raw egg, which was unremarkable in household cooking of the period and is the reason the page is worth reading rather than following.