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Orange Tarts
Beat thoroughly together the juice of two large oranges, the grated peel of one, three-fourths cup of sugar, and one tablespoon of butter; add one full teaspoon of cornstarch stirred into the juice of one-half lemon, and bake in tart shells.
MILLEFEUILLES-Roll puff paste one-half-inch thick and with a floured knife cut into strips three inches long by one inch wide. Brush with egg glaze, as previously directed, and sprinkle with sugar. Place on ice for a half hour before baking and then place in a hot oven for twenty minutes. The strips should be well browned when done and are excellent to serve with afternoon tea.
Two items ran together in the original column: a baked orange curd-style tart filling, and a batch of sugared puff-paste strips. Both are workable, but the orange filling is written thin and the puff-paste entry carries the only oven instruction on the page.
- The hinge: not enough thickenerOne teaspoon of cornstarch for the juice of two oranges and half a lemon is barely enough to set anything; the result will be a soft, saucy filling that firms only slightly on cooling. If you want a sliceable tart, count on nearer a tablespoon of cornstarch, or add an egg yolk or two and treat it as a curd.
- Oven and time for the tartsNo temperature is given. Bake small filled shells at 350F until the filling is set at the edges and only just trembling at the centre, roughly 20 to 25 minutes. Higher heat risks the butter separating out into a greasy layer.
- Tart shellsThe recipe assumes pastry cases already fitted into small tins, baked with the filling in them. Blind-baking the shells first and briefly baking the filling gives a cleaner base with a wet citrus mixture like this one.
- Juice volume variesMeasure rather than count: two large oranges give roughly two-thirds to one cup of juice, and half a lemon about a tablespoon. Adjust the three-quarters cup of sugar downward if your oranges are very sweet.
- Grated peelTake only the coloured zest, not the white pith beneath, which turns bitter when baked in sugar. A microplane does in seconds what a nutmeg grater did clumsily.
- YieldThe quantity fills roughly eight to ten tartlet shells of two and a half to three inches, or one seven-inch tart with a thin layer.
- Millefeuilles: the stripsHalf an inch is thick for puff paste cut into inch-wide fingers; they will rise into blocks. A quarter-inch rolls out to something closer to the crisp tea biscuit intended. The half hour "on ice" is chilling to firm the butter, and it genuinely matters for the lift.
- Hot ovenFor the puff strips, a hot oven means 425 to 450F. Twenty minutes at that heat is right for well-browned pastry; watch the sugar, which can scorch before the layers finish.
- Egg glazeThe recipe refers back to an egg glaze given earlier in the book; such glazes are typically a whole egg or yolk beaten with a little water or milk, brushed on thinly. Keep it off the cut edges or the layers glue shut and will not rise.
Baked orange tarts of this kind descend from the English orange and lemon "puddings" and cheesecakes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which citrus juice, sugar and butter were bound with eggs or, later, cornstarch, and baked in a paste shell. What is striking in the Butterick version is the near-absence of egg: by 1900 cornstarch was cheap and widely available as a thickener. The millefeuilles that follows shows the book's other register entirely. The name means "a thousand leaves," a reference to puff pastry's layers, and here it is applied not to the layered cream slice most people now picture but to plain sugared strips for afternoon tea. Butterick was a dress-pattern company that also issued cook books.