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Cream Tart
Put one quart of milk into a saucepan, flavor it with vanilla, place it over the fire, stir in gradually four tablespoonfuls of the finest sifted flour, sweeten to taste with caster-sugar, and continue stirring over the fire until thick. When ready, move the cream to the side of the fire, and stir in the beaten yolks of six eggs, taking care to keep the mixture free from lumps. Rub one-half pound of butter into one pound of flour till quite smooth, and add the beaten yolk of three eggs, and sufficient milk to make a stiff paste. Sprinkle a little flour over the table, roll the paste out, stick about two ounces of butter over it in little pieces, fold over, and leave again for half an hour, then beat the paste again with a rolling-pin, dust it over with a little more flour, and roll it out. Butter a tart-dish, line it with the paste and pour in the prepared cream, using the trimmings of the paste to make a rim to the tart and strips across. Brush the paste over with a feather or a fine brush dipped in the beaten yolk of an egg, and bake in a quick oven. Serve either cold or hot.
Two preparations in one entry: a vanilla pastry cream and a rough puff paste. Both are sound, but the quantities are generous by modern standards and the oven instruction needs interpreting.
- The hinge: cook the cream before the yolks go inThe flour-thickened milk must be cooked out until it is genuinely thick and no longer tastes raw, then pulled off the heat before the yolks are stirred in. "Move the cream to the side of the fire" means off direct heat; yolks added over a live flame will scramble in seconds.
- Flour and thicknessFour tablespoons of flour to a quart of milk gives a loose cream that sets further with the yolks and again in the oven. If you want a filling that holds a clean cut, six to eight tablespoons is closer to modern pastry-cream practice.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, sold as caster in Britain and as superfine or bar sugar in the US. Ordinary granulated works here since it dissolves in hot milk. Figure 3/4 to 1 cup for a quart.
- VanillaIn 1896 this meant a split bean steeped in the milk, or a few drops of extract. Steep the bean in the milk before the flour goes in, and remove it.
- Halve the pasteOne pound of flour with half a pound of butter, three yolks and two ounces more butter folded in makes roughly 2 lb of rough puff, and the quantity lines a single tart dish with trimmings to spare. Chill between the folds; the half-hour rest the recipe calls for is best taken in the refrigerator in a modern kitchen rather than on the counter.
- "A quick oven"Conventionally somewhere around 400-425F, though the term is approximate. That is right for setting the puff paste, but a quart of custard will curdle at that heat if held there. Start high for the first 15 minutes to lift the pastry, then drop to 350F until the centre is just set with a slight wobble.
- The featherA quill brush was standard kitchen equipment before nylon pastry brushes. Any soft brush does the same job; thin the yolk with a teaspoon of water so it goes on evenly rather than in gluey streaks.
- Dish and yieldA 9- or 10-inch tart dish, deep enough for the filling. Serves 8 to 10. The quart of cream will overfill a shallow pan, so hold back what does not fit rather than filling to the rim.
Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and put his name to this 1896 collection, was Swiss-born, and his career was front-of-house rather than a formal kitchen apprenticeship. The recipe belongs to the European tradition: this is crème pâtissière baked in a butter-paste shell with a lattice, the standard European tart of the period rather than anything specifically American. The two-stage method flour-and-milk cream finished off the heat with yolks is the classic pastry cream taught in French kitchens throughout the nineteenth century, and the "rub butter into flour, fold, rest, roll again" paste is rough puff rather than true laminated puff, the version working kitchens used when a tart shell did not need to rise dramatically. The text gives no temperature or time, only "a quick oven," which is typical of the book: it was written for people who could read an oven by hand and eye.