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Lemon Tarts
Mix well together the juice and grated rind of two lemons, two cups of sugar, two eggs, and the crumbs of sponge cake; beat it all together until smooth; put into twelve patty-pans lined with puffpaste, and bake until the crust is done.
A late-Victorian lemon curd tart made economical by stretching the filling with stale sponge cake. The original assumes you know what a patty-pan is and how much cake you have on hand, so a few things need pinning down.
- The cake crumbs are unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity, which is genuinely ambiguous — it assumes the odds and ends of a sponge left over from another day. About a cup of fine dry crumbs suits two lemons and two eggs; much more and the filling turns to pudding, much less and it stays loose.
- Patty-pansThese are shallow individual tart tins, roughly 2½ to 3 inches across, not deep muffin cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works but will give a deeper, slower-setting tart.
- Puff pasteNineteenth-century puff paste is a laminated butter dough, closer to today's rough puff than to shortcrust. Frozen all-butter puff pastry is a fair substitute; blind-baking the shells briefly keeps the bottoms from going sodden under a wet filling.
- Oven temperaturePuff paste wants a hot start, around 400–425°F, so the layers lift before the filling weeps into them. Drop to 350°F once the pastry has risen and coloured.
- "Bake until the crust is done" is not the real signalThe crust will look finished before the egg has set. Bake until the centres are just firm to a light touch and no longer sloshing — a wobble is fine, liquid is not.
- Two cups of sugar is a period ratioTwo cups of sugar -- Against two lemons this is very sweet by current taste. A cup and a half still sets properly and lets the lemon through.
- Grating the rindTake only the yellow zest; pith carried through with it will give the filling a bitter edge.
- YieldTwelve small tarts, best eaten the day they are baked — the pastry softens under the filling overnight.
Lemon tarts of this kind sit between two older English traditions: the lemon cheesecake, which used curd or ground almonds as a body, and lemon curd proper, which is just juice, sugar, eggs and butter cooked to a cream. The sponge crumbs here are a household economy — stale cake was commonly worked back into puddings, charlottes and tart fillings. Lemons were an everyday grocery by this period in American and British towns, imported in quantity from Sicily and later California, which is why a recipe can call for two of them without comment. Note also that there is no butter in the filling, which is what separates this from modern lemon curd; the richness comes from the puff paste beneath.