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Gooseberry-and-Cream Tarts
Line some small patty-pans with puff paste and bake them gently in the oven; turn them out when done, half fill them with well-whipped cream and cook for a few minutes until the cream is firm, put ripe gooseberries glazed with syrup over the top, and serve either warm or cold.
Oscar gives no quantities and no temperatures, which is typical of the book — it was written for cooks who already knew how a puff-paste shell behaves. The points below fill in what a modern kitchen needs.
- Patty-pansThese are small shallow tart tins, roughly 2 to 3 inches across; individual tartlet moulds are the closest stand-in, and a 12-cup muffin tin will do, though its cups are deeper. Expect roughly eight to twelve tarts from a sheet of puff pastry, enough for four to six people.
- "Bake them gently"Oscar gives no temperature. For puff paste the aim is heat enough to lift the layers but not so hot that the edges scorch before the centre dries; around 400F for 15 to 20 minutes is a reasonable modern reading, though it is hotter than "gently" might imply. Puff pastry needs real heat to laminate, and a genuinely slow oven tends to give greasy, collapsed shells.
- Keeping the shells hollowPrick the bases and weight them with paper and beans, or press a second small tin inside, so the centre stays low enough to hold filling. Oscar's instruction to "turn them out when done" assumes shells that release cleanly, which means well-chilled pastry going into a hot oven.
- Setting the creamThe second baking is brief. With no egg in it, whipped cream firms only a little rather than setting properly; a low oven — in the region of 300 to 325F for five to eight minutes, until just firm to the touch — is about as far as it can be pushed before it weeps butterfat and the pastry underneath goes sodden.
- Sweetening the creamThe original leaves it unstated; whip a cup of heavy cream with about two tablespoons of sugar to soft-firm peaks, stopping short of grainy.
- Gooseberries and the glazeUse ripe dessert gooseberries, not the hard green cooking sort, which stay sour and split. The "syrup" is a simple sugar syrup boiled to a light thread and brushed over the fruit; reduced apple jelly does the same job with less fuss.
- Sourcing the fruitFresh gooseberries are seasonal and regional in North America, appearing briefly in early summer at farm markets. Frozen or good-quality bottled gooseberries in syrup work for the topping, but drain them thoroughly or the pastry softens.
- Serving windowAssemble close to serving. Filled puff shells lose their crispness within an hour or two, and Oscar's "warm or cold" suggests tarts eaten the day they are baked.
Gooseberries were a far more familiar fruit in the nineteenth century than they are now on this side of the Atlantic — northern English gooseberry clubs competed over the size of their berries, and the fruit was a fixture of British puddings, fools and tarts. Oscar Tschirky's book, drawn from the Waldorf's kitchens in the 1890s, is full of these European-hotel staples: a small crisp puff-paste case, a set cream filling and glazed fruit on top is the standard Continental patisserie grammar of the period, applied here to whatever was ripe. American gooseberry growing was later curtailed when cultivated Ribes were found to host white pine blister rust and were restricted in many states in the early twentieth century, which is a large part of why the berry that Oscar treated as ordinary now takes some hunting.