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Orange Tartlets
Take out the pulp from two oranges, boil the peels until quite tender, and then beat them to a paste with twice their weight of pounded loaf sugar; then add the pulp and the juice of the oranges with a piece of butter the size of a walnut, beat all the ingredients together, line some patty-pans with rich puffpaste, lay the orange mixture in them and bake them.
A compact Victorian-style orange curd baked in pastry shells. The recipe gives no oven temperature, no timing and no yield, so the useful work here is filling in the blanks.
- Boil the peel properlyThis is the hinge of the recipe. The text asks only that the peel be "quite tender", which in practice means a long simmer; changing the water once or twice is a common way of drawing out bitterness. Underdone peel will leave the filling coarse rather than smooth.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone, broken off with nippers and then crushed in a mortar. Ordinary granulated sugar is the nearest modern equivalent; caster sugar dissolves faster into the peel paste.
- Twice their weightWeigh the drained cooked peel and use double that weight in sugar. Two medium oranges give roughly 4 oz of boiled peel, so about 8 oz sugar — a very sweet filling by modern taste, and closer to a marmalade than a curd.
- A piece of butter the size of a walnutUsually reckoned at about 1 oz, or two tablespoons, though such comparisons were never standardised and vary between books.
- Patty-pansSmall shallow tins for individual tarts. A twelve-hole tartlet or shallow bun tin is the direct equivalent; the recipe states no yield, but this quantity of filling would suit somewhere around a dozen small shells.
- Pounding the pasteA mortar and a strong arm are assumed. A food processor does the job in seconds, but stopping while a little texture remains gives a filling closer to the original.
- Oven and timingNo temperature or time is given, and the recipe says only to line the pans with puff paste, fill and bake. A modern cook will need to judge it: a hot oven of around 400F for long enough to set the filling and colour the pastry is a reasonable starting point.
- Pips and membrane"Take out the pulp" means the flesh. Pick out seeds and the tough central core before beating them in, or they will show up in the finished tart.
Boiled citrus peel beaten to a paste with sugar is a long-established sweet preparation in the English kitchen, related to the medieval and Tudor taste for candied and preserved peel, when oranges arrived from Spain and Portugal as an expensive winter luxury and little of them was wasted. Recipes of this shape — peel softened, pounded with sugar, enriched with juice and a knob of butter, and baked in small pastry cases — appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household manuals, and they sit alongside lemon cheesecakes and curd tarts in the same chapters.