Apple Tarts
Pare, quarter, core, and boil in a half tea-cup of water until very soft, ten large tart apples; beat till very smooth, then add the yolks of six eggs or three whole eggs, juice and grated rind of two lemons, half cup butter, one and a half cups sugar, or more if not sweet enough; beat all thoroughly, line little tart-tins with puff-paste, and fill with the mixture, bake five minutes in a hot oven. wanted very nice, take the whites of the six eggs (when the yolks of six are used), mix with six table-spoons pulverized sugar, spread on the top of the tarts, return to oven and brown slightly. If For almond tarts, beat to a cream the yolks of three eggs and a quarter of a pound of sugar, add half a pound of shelled almonds pounded slightly, put in tart-tins lined with puff-paste; bake eight minutes.
For cocoa-nuts, dissolve half pound sugar in quarter of a pint water, add half a grated cocoa-nut, let this boil slowly for a few minutes, and when cold, add the well-beaten yolks of three eggs and the white of one; beat all well together, and pour into pattypans lined with a rich crust; bake a few minutes. When removed from oven, cover the tarts with a meringue made of the whites of the three eggs, mixed with three table-spoons sugar; return to oven, and brown delicately.
Three fillings in one entry: an apple-lemon curd, an almond, and a coconut, all baked in small pastry shells. The apple filling is the main event and the one with the most misleading timing.
- The five-minute bake is wrongA raw puff-paste shell filled with wet apple-and-egg mixture will not set in five minutes. Blind-bake the lined tins first, then fill and bake at 375F until the custard is just firm at the centre, roughly 15-20 minutes. The short times given for the almond and coconut versions have the same problem.
- Oven temperatures"A hot oven" is nowhere defined in degrees in the book; it is conventionally read as somewhere around 425-450F. That suits puff pastry alone but will scorch an egg-thickened filling, so use the higher heat for the blind bake and drop to about 375F once the filling goes in; the meringue will brown at 400F in three or four minutes.
- Tart-tins and pattypansBoth mean small individual tins, roughly 2 to 3 inches across, of the sort used for jam tarts. A twelve-cup muffin or tartlet tray works; expect about 18 to 24 tartlets from the apple quantity, which is a large batch.
- Tart apples"Tart" is doing real work here, since the sugar is heavy and there is lemon on top of it. Bramley, Granny Smith, or a firm cooking apple; ten large ones is roughly 4 to 5 lb before paring. Cook them covered so the half tea-cup of water is enough to steam them down.
- Butter and sugar in a curdHalf a cup of butter and a cup and a half of sugar into cooked apple pulp makes an apple curd, not a puree. Beat the butter in while the apples are still hot, then let the mixture cool before adding the eggs so they do not scramble.
- Reading the meringue stepThe meringue instruction opens "wanted very nice," while the word "If" sits a few lines lower, ahead of "For almond tarts." Read the passage as "If wanted very nice, take the whites of the six eggs," and ignore the stray "If" before the almond directions.
- AlmondsHalf a pound of shelled almonds pounded slightly means a coarse, gritty grind, not fine flour. Blanch and skin them first unless you want the filling flecked brown, and grind them dry with a little of the sugar to stop them turning to paste.
- CoconutHalf a grated coconut is roughly 1 1/2 cups of fresh grated meat. Unsweetened desiccated coconut can stand in, but soak it in the sugar syrup a few minutes longer to soften; sweetened flake will push the filling past edible.
- MeringueSix tablespoons of sugar to six whites is a very lean meringue by modern standards and will weep on a warm filling. Beat to firm peaks, spread so it seals to the pastry rim, and brown only until the tips colour.
The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) belongs to the same family of compiled American household manuals as the Buckeye books, and this entry shows the method plainly: one headword, then a chain of variations packed in behind it, so that a single paragraph does the work of four recipes and saves precious page space. The apple filling itself is a lemon-and-butter curd built on cooked fruit, finished with six yolks and a whipped-white meringue on top, the point at which a plain tart became something "very nice" enough for company. The almond and coconut variants tell you about the pantry rather than the region. Shelled almonds by the half pound and whole coconuts were both imported goods, cheap enough by the 1880s to appear in a general-purpose cookbook.