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Honey Tarts (Make pie crust cut out)
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-One cup honey, one-half cup butter, one egg, lemon extract, or juice to taste. Beat honey and butter together, add egg and beat again. Flour and fill tarts.
The pastry half of this is straightforward; the filling is where it falls apart, both as writing and as food safety. The instructions never cook the egg.
- The raw egg is the problemOne whole egg is beaten into honey and softened butter, and the resulting mixture is spooned into shells that have already been baked. Nothing in the recipe brings that egg above room temperature, and a honey-butter emulsion left standing sits in the range where Salmonella can multiply. A current recipe for honey tarts, with a cooked or baked filling, should be used instead.
- "Flour and fill tarts"This is the most likely place a step was lost in editing. It may mean flour is to be beaten into the filling as a thickener, or that the work surface is floured for rolling. Either way, no quantity is given and no cooking of the filling is described, so the sentence cannot be reconstructed with any confidence.
- An old-fashioned tart cutterA pair of nested cutters, or a single cutter that stamped a round and a matching ring in one motion. The book's own workaround is the standard one: cut plain rounds, cut rings from more pastry, and stack a ring on each round to build a raised rim that holds filling.
- "Bake light brown"This is a blind-baked shell, browned but not coloured deeply, since nothing further is baked in it. The rings need docking or weighting or they lift and tilt as the fat melts.
- Lemon extract or juiceLemon extract of this period was alcohol-based and strongly flavoured, so it would have been used sparingly; the recipe gives no quantity at all, only 'to taste'. Juice and extract are not interchangeable here — juice also thins the mixture.
- "Sprinkle with nuts or whipped cream"The verb belongs only to the nuts; the cream is piped or spooned on. Both are finishing touches, which is why the book directs that the shells be filled just before using.
- YieldOne cup of honey with half a cup of butter makes roughly two cups of filling — enough for a dozen to eighteen small tart shells, depending on the cutter.
Honey as the sweetener in a butter-and-egg tart filling belongs to the same thrifty tradition that produced honey cakes and honey cookies, and it became conspicuous in American recipe books during the sugar shortages and conservation campaigns of the First World War era, when honey, molasses and corn syrup were promoted as patriotic substitutes.