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Paganini Tartlets
Put the whites of three eggs into a basin, beat them to a froth, and add by degrees five or six ounces of sifted crushed loaf sugar. Have in readiness one tartlet or patty-pan lined with puff paste, put a little orange or apricot marmalade in the center of each, and bake them in a moderate oven for fifteen minutes. When done remove them, heap the egg mixture on top, and serve them either hot or cold.
A short Victorian confection: puff-paste shells with marmalade, finished with a heap of uncooked meringue. Two things need attention — the sugar ratio and the fact that the egg white never sees the oven.
- The meringue is raw as writtenOscar has you beat the whites, bake the shells, then heap the mixture on and serve. Nothing cooks the egg white. Either return the topped tartlets to a 350F oven for 8-10 minutes to set and lightly colour the meringue, or build it as a Swiss meringue (whites and sugar whisked over simmering water to 160F before beating stiff).
- Loaf sugarSugar arrived as a hard cone that was broken up, crushed and sifted. "Sifted crushed loaf sugar" is simply fine white sugar; use caster or superfine, which dissolves into the whites without grittiness.
- The sugar ratioFive to six ounces to three whites (about 3 oz of white) is roughly double the weight of the whites — a stiff, sweet, almost hard-drying meringue rather than a soft one. Four ounces gives a lighter result if you prefer.
- Moderate oven350F. Fifteen minutes is enough for small puff-paste shells; watch that the pastry rims are dry and golden rather than pale, since they get no second bake unless you brown the meringue.
- "One tartlet or patty-pan"The singular sits oddly with the recipe's own "each," which suggests a slip in the text. Read it as a tray of patty-pans, the shallow tartlet cups of a Victorian bun tin. Three whites and 6 oz sugar should top roughly a dozen 2-inch tartlets.
- Puff pasteCommercial all-butter puff pastry is a fair substitute. Line the cups, prick the bases, and keep the marmalade to a scant teaspoon; thin or loose preserve will boil over the rim and weld the shells into the tin.
- ServingHot or cold, as given, but meringue on a warm shell weeps within an hour or two. Assemble close to the time you intend to serve.
Nineteenth-century kitchens named dishes after celebrities freely, and the violinist Niccolo Paganini -- who died in 1840 and remained a byword for virtuosity for the rest of the century -- had his name attached to dishes with no evident connection to the man beyond fashion. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book gathers a great deal of this inherited European repertoire alongside the Waldorf's own dishes, and the phrasing here (basin, patty-pan, crushed loaf sugar) reads like the English confectionery manuals of the period rather than anything peculiar to New York. What it records is a period habit: a plain jam tartlet was raised to a named dessert simply by crowning it with sweetened beaten white.