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Raspberry Tarts with Cream
Butter some rather large patty-pans and line them with a thin layer of puff paste. Pick the raspberries over carefully to remove all the stems, etc., place them in the pans, sprinkle with sugar and cover with paste, trimming it off neatly round the edges. Bake the tarts in a quick oven. Beat the yolks of three eggs with one-half pint of cream and sweeten slightly with sugar. When the tarts are cooked lift the covers, pour in the cream and place them in the oven for seven or eight minutes longer. The tarts may be served either hot or cold.
A two-stage tart: the fruit bakes under a puff-paste lid, then the lid is lifted and a light custard poured in to finish. The measurements are Edwardian shorthand, and the second bake is the part most likely to go wrong.
- Patty-pansThese are shallow individual tart tins, roughly the size of a modern muffin cup or a 3-inch tartlet mould. "Rather large" suggests something closer to a deep muffin tin, which gives room for the berries and the custard afterwards.
- A quick ovenNo temperature is given; period usage puts a "quick" oven at roughly 400-425F. Puff paste needs that sort of heat to lift and set; a cooler oven produces a greasy, slumped shell.
- Half a pint of creamOne cup in American measure. With three yolks that gives a loose custard, which is what is wanted here since it only gets seven or eight minutes of heat.
- Puff pasteStore-bought all-butter puff pastry works. Roll it thin for the lining, and cut the lids slightly larger than the tin so they can be trimmed flush after the fruit goes in.
- The hinge: the second bakeThe custard is poured into hot tarts and returned to the oven only long enough to thicken, not to set firm. If the oven is still at full quick heat the yolks will curdle and weep; drop it to around 350F before the tarts go back in, and pull them while the centre still trembles.
- SugarThe original gives no quantity twice over. Reckon on a teaspoon or so of sugar per tart over the berries, and a tablespoon or two total in the cream — raspberries are tart and the custard is meant to be only faintly sweet.
- Lifting the coversSlide a thin knife around the lid and lift it whole; it will have set into a crisp disc. Replace it at an angle after pouring so the custard is visible, or set it back flat if serving cold.
- YieldA cup of cream and three yolks fills about six to eight tartlets, depending on how generous the fruit layer is.
Fruit under a pastry lid with custard poured in afterwards is an old English trick — the same principle as the "tart of.. with a caudle" found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century receipt books, where a sweetened egg-and-cream mixture was poured through a hole or under the lifted crust once the fruit had baked. It does solve a practical problem: raspberries throw off a great deal of juice, and a custard added at the end binds that juice instead of turning the base to paste. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book gathered a great many such English and French household forms alongside the Waldorf's own dishes, and this one would seem to belong to the plainer, older end of that range rather than to anything invented in the hotel's kitchens.