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Chocolate Cream Tarts
Boil a pint of milk with one ounce of grated chocolate and a little sugar. Mix two ounces of flour with a quarter of a pound of sugar, and beat them in the boiling milk, then add one ounce of butter and four yolks of beaten eggs, removing the pan before the eggs are cooked. Line tart-pans with tart-paste, fill with the chocolate cream, and bake in a slack oven. Whip the whites of the eggs, add two tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar, and make a meringue. Squeeze this from a bag over the tops of the tarts, and brown.
A French pastry cream flavoured with chocolate, baked in pastry shells and finished with a piped meringue. The measurements are by weight and the oven instruction is vague, so a few numbers help.
- The hinge: pull the pan off the heatThe yolks go in off the boil and the pan comes away before they set, or the cream turns to sweet scrambled egg. Temper a ladle of the hot mixture into the beaten yolks first, then return them to the pan and stir over low heat only until it thickens visibly.
- Cook the flour outTwo ounces of flour in a pint of milk is a stiff pastry cream, and raw flour tastes of paste. Let the milk-flour-sugar base bubble and thicken for a good two minutes, whisking hard, before the butter and yolks go anywhere near it.
- Weights in cupsA pint of milk is 2 cups if the book is using American measure; 2 oz flour is a scant 1/2 cup; a quarter pound of sugar is a generous 1/2 cup granulated; 1 oz butter is 2 tablespoons. The recipe specifies only 'grated chocolate' and does not say whether it is sweetened.