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Tarts
Fruit Tarts.
In making fruit tarts put sugar over the fruit to make it shrink, and take care the oven to be not too slack, so that the dome of paste may not fall with the fruit and get "sad." Tart - Rhubarb. For Sauce, see Apple Pie, and Rhubarb Jelly recipes. Tart - Strawberry Tart of fresh Fruit. (Mrs. Caswell.) Put short crust in a round, flat tin, turning up edges like a wall to keep in the syrup. Fill with dry uncooked rice only to keep in shape, the rice to be on a paper which will lift out. Bake it.
The fresh strawberries must be scalded in syrup, and the syrup reduced.. Pop in the strawberries and syrup when the tart is ready to serve. (You can use up the rice for something else afterwards.) Tartlets - Lady Abbess's.
Blanch and pound 4 ozs. of best Jordan almonds with a little orange-flower water. Add 2 ozs. of fresh butter and the same of sifted sugar. Mix well and bake in small patty pans lined with pastry; bake in a quick oven.
When cold, dish with a little preserve in each.
Tartlets - Cream. (Sherwood.) Line some small tartlet pans with a light puff-paste, and into each put 2 or 3 teaspoonfuls of apricot jam. Just before putting into the oven, fill them up with the following custard, previously made and added cold: Take ¼ pt. of cream, and let it boil. Take 3 yolks of egg, and 2 only of their whites. Beat them well and add by degrees a tablespoonful of flour, beating all the time, so that flour and eggs are thoroughly well mixed. Add the boiling cream to the mixture, still beating all the time. Sweeten to taste (about 2 teaspoonfuls sugar), and let all stand till cold. Bake the tartlets 20 minutes. Dish very hot.
Tartlets - "Diplomatic." (Cataldi.) Line some tartlet pans with short crust, and have ready the following custard (to make 8 or 10 tartlets): - The yolks of 3 eggs, 3 teaspoonfuls of potato flour or of ground rice, 2½ tablespoonfuls of sugar, and a teaspoonful of sugar which is flavoured with vanilla or with 2 bitter almonds bruised and pounded. Mix all these well together, then add ³¼ pt. of cream and mix it also well again. Then boil it. 3 After boiling add a piece of butter the size of a nut, and mix it carefully and thoroughly well in. Then fill the tartlet pans with the mixture. Bake the tartlets, and afterwards ice them with vanilla-flavoured sugar, and to ornament the tartlets put a cherry and 4 diamond shapes of angelica and candied peel, as leaves round it at the top of each.
They are very good, and look pretty.
Tipsy Cake.
Bake a sponge cake in a Baba mould. Stick it all over with almond spikes; soak it in a wineglassful of sherry; put preserve in centre if you like; cover with thick custard, and cover the custard with Italian Cream, No. 1 (see Cream), and serve in a trifle dish. Trifle.
First put on a dish a layer of ratafia drops and macaroons mixed, then a layer of sponge cake, ¹½ in. thick, soaked 2 hours in a wineglassful of sherry; cover with apricot jam, the jam with custard, the custard with Italian Cream, No. 1 (see Cream). Serve in a glass dish.
Mrs. John Wood's "trifle" is rather different.
This is her recipe: Sponge cakes sliced laterally, jam spread on one side only of each slice - half yellow jam (apricot), half green (plums), or red (strawberry) - but have two kinds of jam. Pile the slices of cake on each other till the dish is full, then soak it in sherry and brandy (equal parts), cover with an almond custard, and cover the custard again with whipped cream, sweetened and flavoured. Scatter over all many-coloured "hundreds and thousands" - harlequin comfits.
Some use ratafia drops alternately with jam - spread cake, and it adds more flavour; then you need no almonds in the custard. "Tutti Frutti." (Eglingham Hall. 1886.) Any fresh ripe fruit you can get. If apricots, pears, peaches or pineapple slices, cut each in halves or quarters, and stew till tender in syrup of sugar and water. Other ripe fruit may be put raw overnight in a strawberry or a raspberry or noyau syrup. If pineapple is used, pare it first. "Whips." (See under Cream - Italian Cream, No. 2.) %
A cluster of related sweet-course entries from a manuscript collection, written in the shorthand of a household that already knew what it was doing. One flavouring in the "Diplomatic" tartlets is the reason for the caution above; the rest of the notes are practical.
- Bitter almondsThe "Diplomatic" tartlets offer 2 bitter almonds bruised and pounded as an alternative to vanilla. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and moistened; their sale as food is restricted or prohibited in the UK, US and EU for that reason. The same caution applies to old-fashioned noyau syrup in the "Tutti Frutti", which was built on kernels of the same type. Modern vanilla extract and commercial almond flavouring carry no such risk.
- Oven heat, and "sad" pastryIn this book's usage a slack oven is a cool one, very roughly 300F, and the quick oven wanted for the Lady Abbess's tartlets a hot one, roughly 400-425F; the equivalents are approximate. The warning about the dome of paste falling is the hinge of the fruit-tart note: a cool oven lets the crust soften and slump onto the shrinking fruit before the structure sets. "Sad" is the old baker's word for heavy and sunken.
- Imperial liquid measureAn Imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so the ¼ pt of cream in the Sherwood tartlets is 5 fl oz (about ⅔ cup) and the ¾ pt in the Cataldi custard is 15 fl oz (just under 2 cups). A gill, if you meet it elsewhere in the book, is 5 fl oz here rather than the American 4.
- Blind baking with riceMrs Caswell's paper-and-rice method is standard blind baking, predating ceramic beans. Line the shell, fill to the rim so the walls cannot slide, and bake until the base is coloured; the rice does indeed keep for cooking afterwards, though after several turns as pie weights it takes on a toasted smell.
- Jordan almondsThese are the long, sweet Spanish-type almonds sold plain, not the sugared confectionery that now carries the name. Blanched whole almonds pounded with a little liquid, as directed, give the right slightly coarse paste; ready-ground almonds make a drier, flatter filling.
- Potato flourPotato flour in the Cataldi custard is potato starch, interchangeable here with cornflour or the ground rice given as its alternative.
- Ratafia drops and hundreds and thousandsRatafias are small, hard, intensely almond-flavoured macaroons, still sold in Britain; amaretti of the crisp sort stand in well. "Harlequin comfits" are the coloured nonpareils now sold as hundreds and thousands.
- Custard timingThe Sherwood tartlets take a flour-thickened custard, which is less liable to curdle over the 20 minutes' baking. Judge by a filling that is set at the edge and barely trembling at the centre rather than by the clock alone, and note the instruction to dish them very hot -- these are meant to come straight from the oven.
- YieldThe Cataldi custard is stated as enough for 8 to 10 tartlets; the Lady Abbess mixture is 4 oz almonds with 2 oz each butter and sugar, baked in small patty pans, with no number given.
Lady Clark of Tillypronie was Charlotte Coltman, wife of Sir John Clark of the Aberdeenshire estate of that name; she spent decades collecting recipes in manuscript from her own cooks, from titled friends, from chefs and from houses she visited, and the book was edited and published from those papers in 1909, after her death. The attributions scattered through this page -- Mrs Caswell, Sherwood, Cataldi, Mrs John Wood, Eglingham Hall 1886 -- are exactly how the collection works: each entry is credited to whoever supplied it, so what survives is less a cookbook than a record of what circulated among late-Victorian country-house kitchens. The trifle entries are the clearest example, giving two rival versions side by side without deciding between them, and the whole group sits in the tradition that runs from the sixteenth-century "trifle" of flavoured cream through the eighteenth-century addition of soaked cake and wine to the layered, jam-and-custard construction assumed here. Tipsy cake, generally traced to the same family of dishes, is simply the trifle built on one whole cake rather than slices, the sherry doing the work its name advertises.