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Filling for Tarts
Take any odds and ends in the way of jelly, preserves, stewed fruit cut in small pieces, pudding
The text as printed breaks off mid-sentence, so what survives is a principle rather than a procedure: sweet leftovers, cut small, become tart filling. Filling in the gaps is straightforward if you treat the pastry as the fixed element and the filling as whatever the larder yields.
- The text is incompleteThe entry as supplied breaks off at "pudding", with no quantities, pastry, oven or time. Whether the original page continued cannot be determined from the fragment. Read it as a note on using up sweets rather than a set of instructions to follow step by step.
- What "tarts" means hereTarts of this kind are often small open shells of plain pie pastry baked in patty pans or muffin cups rather than one large fruit tart, though the fragment does not say which is meant. A single-crust pie's worth of pastry will make roughly eight to ten little shells.
- Bake the shells firstJelly, preserves and cooked pudding are already set and need no cooking time, so they will scorch or weep before the pastry crisps. Blind-bake the empty shells at 400F until set and lightly coloured -- about 10 to 15 minutes for small shells -- then cool and fill.
- Manage the moistureStewed fruit and thin jelly will soak the base. Drain stewed fruit well, or cook the mixture down for a few minutes with a teaspoon of cornstarch per cup before it goes in.
- Balance the sweetnessPreserves and jelly from this era were made at high sugar ratios and modern jam is little better. If you are combining several odds and ends, a squeeze of lemon or a little grated citrus zest keeps the filling from reading as flat sugar.
- What not to mix"Pudding" in this period covers everything from cornstarch blancmange to a boiled suet pudding. Dairy-based puddings and acid fruit preserves do not sit well together; keep custard-type fillings in their own shells.
- ServingFill shortly before serving. Filled shells go soft within a few hours, and a filled tart is not worth keeping overnight.
Cookbooks devoted to left-overs were a recognisable category in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aimed at middle-class households running a kitchen on a fixed allowance. The logic behind an entry like this is that sugar-preserved goods and cooked puddings were valuable and did not keep indefinitely once opened, so scraping out the last of a jelly pot into a pastry shell was thrift rather than improvisation. The open tart shell filled with jam is far older than these books, and was a standing feature of English and Scottish baking.