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Orange Tartlets
Remove the rinds from one dozen sweet oranges, quarter them and take out the core; boil for about three minutes in a small quantity of sugar and water, and put on a sieve to drain. Boil the juice that runs from them, and the liquor that they were boiled in to a syrup. Have ready some shells of pastry baked in patty-pans. Put the oranges in the hot syrup for a few minutes, but do not let them boil, lay them in the shells of crust, and just before serving pour the syrup over.
A simple compote-in-pastry that depends almost entirely on how far you reduce the syrup. The original gives no quantities for the sugar and water, so the cook is expected to judge by eye.
- Patty-pansThese are small shallow tartlet tins, roughly 2 to 2.5 inches across. A twelve-hole muffin or mini-tart tin does the same job; line with shortcrust and bake blind at 400F until dry and pale gold.
- The syrup is the hingeEverything rests on boiling the drained juice and poaching liquid down to a proper syrup that coats a spoon. Underdone, it will soak into the pastry.
- Sugar and water, unmeasuredThe original says only "a small quantity." A simple syrup of roughly equal weights sugar and water, enough to half-cover the fruit, is one workable reading, but the amount is genuinely left to the cook.
- Quartering and coringWith the peel off, quarter each orange and cut away the tough white core and any thick pith from the segment edges. Seedless navel oranges make quick work of this; seeded varieties need picking over.
- Three minutes means three minutesCitrus segments break down quickly in sugar syrup. Boil them briefly, then drain; the second stay in the syrup is a warming, not a cooking, and the instruction not to let it boil is the reason the fruit holds its shape.
- Assemble at the last momentBaked shells, warm fruit and hot syrup should meet just before the plates go out, as the recipe's "just before serving" indicates; held together, the crust softens.
- YieldA dozen oranges fills roughly twelve to sixteen small tartlets, depending on tin size. The recipe states no number of servings.
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, when the Waldorf's kitchen could count on citrus arriving from a number of growing regions by rail and steamer — sweet oranges are often said to have shifted, over the course of the nineteenth century, from a winter luxury to a dependable hotel staple. The dish belongs to a large family of Victorian fruit tartlets in which pastry shells are baked separately and filled at service, a method generally traced to French pâtisserie and well suited to a hotel turning out many covers at once. The name is plain description: tartlet is simply the diminutive of tart, used in English cookery since at least the seventeenth century for individual pastry cases. Note that nothing is thickened and nothing is candied — this is fruit, sugar and crust, a lighter close to a meal than the heavy boiled and baked puddings that filled many American cookbooks of the same decade.