Fonchonetts
Proceed as for "creaprecies." When baked place an almond macaroon (procurable at any bakers or grocers if you have none in store) in each, cover the macaroon with half quince and half red currant jelly. Next have paper cone, same as used for ornamenting a cake with frosting, fill this cone with meringue, same as used for the "creaprecies;" next drop a spoonful of meringue in the center on the jelly, then with the meringue in the paper cone drop a small cone shaped pile on the center, on what is already on the jelly; then drop five or six around it. This will give you a circle of cones with one in the center; the cones must not be too small, as they will not look well; they should be as large as a twenty-five cent piece and at least one inch in height; now return them to the oven just to color them. When cold drop just a little red currant jelly on the point of each cone. This makes one of the prettiest of fancy pastry dishes, and sets off a table wonderfully well. I will give my method of making a beefsteak pie.
This is a finishing method rather than a full recipe: it assumes you have already made the tartlet shells and filling from the preceding entry, which the typesetter has mangled into "creaprecies" (almost certainly the cream tartlets or cream puffs given just above, with their meringue). Work backwards from that page and this becomes straightforward.
- The missing baseYou need small baked pastry shells and a bowl of soft meringue. Any short-crust tartlet shell of about 2 to 2 1/2 inches, blind-baked, will stand in; what the preceding entry filled them with cannot be recovered from this page alone.
- The hinge: meringue stiffnessThe cones only hold their shape if the meringue is beaten to firm, glossy peaks with the sugar fully dissolved. Under-beaten meringue slumps into a puddle over the jelly the moment it warms.
- Paper coneA paper cornet is a rolled triangle of parchment with the tip snipped off. A piping bag with a 1/2-inch plain tip does the same job; the recipe wants a plain round point, not a star.
- Size of the conesA twenty-five cent piece of the period is roughly the same diameter as a modern quarter, about 24 mm. Pipe each cone that wide at the base and a full inch tall, as the author insists, or the finished tart reads as fussy rather than decorated.
- Oven for colouring"Just to color them" means a brief return to a fairly hot oven, watched constantly. The aim is tan tips, not a dried-out meringue.
- Quince jellyQuince jelly was a standard preserve in nineteenth-century kitchens and is still sold in Spanish and Middle Eastern groceries; membrillo paste thinned with a little water will serve. Its point is the perfume and firm set against the sharper currant.
- MacaroonsThe almond macaroon meant here is the chewy French-style disc of ground almond, sugar and egg white, not a coconut macaroon and not a filled Parisian macaron. It should sit flat in the shell and be small enough to disappear under the jelly.
- Egg whitesA few minutes of oven colouring will not pasteurise the meringue through. If serving to anyone frail, elderly or pregnant, use pasteurised whites or a cooked-sugar Italian meringue, which also pipes and holds better.
- Yield and servingServing -- Assemble the day they are eaten; the jelly weeps and the shells soften overnight.
"Fonchonetts" is an Anglicised spelling of fanchonnettes, small filled tartlets crowned with meringue that appear in French pastry manuals through the nineteenth century; the name is generally traced to Fanchon, a familiar diminutive of Françoise. Their arrival in The Dixie Cook Book is a reminder that American compilations of the 1880s did not stop at regional home cooking, and the voice here reads, at least to the ear, like a professional's, complete with the aside about where to buy macaroons if the household has none and the abrupt promise to move on to a beefsteak pie. The instruction to return the finished tarts to the oven only to colour the meringue also dates the piece to a kitchen with a range whose heat was judged by hand rather than by dial, where a cook learned to say "just to color" because no number would have meant anything.