Tart Shells
Roll out thin a nice puff-paste, cut out with a glass or biscuit cutter, with a wine-glass or smaller cup cut out the center of two out of three of these, lay the rings thus made on the third, and bake immediately; or shells may be made by lining patty-pans with paste. If the paste is light, the shells will be fine, and may be used for tarts or oyster patties. Filled with jelly and covered with meringue (table-spoon sugar to white of one egg), and browned in oven, they are very nice to serve for tea.
A method rather than a measured recipe: two ways to make tartlet cases from puff pastry, plus a filling suggestion. Everything depends on the pastry staying cold and the oven being genuinely hot.
- Bake immediately means keep it coldBake immediately -- The instruction to bake at once is the hinge. Puff paste that sits at room temperature while you fuss with the cutter will slump and leak butter instead of rising in layers. The book's remedy is speed; if the paste has already warmed while you cut, chilling the rounds on the sheet for 15-20 minutes before baking is a modern substitute, not the book's direction.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names no temperature. Puff paste of this kind wants a hot oven; in a modern oven 425-450F for 15-20 minutes, until the rings are set and deep gold, answers. A cooler oven melts the butter before the steam can lift the layers.
- Puff-pasteA nice puff-paste here means a laminated butter dough made at home. All-butter frozen puff pastry, thawed in the refrigerator and rolled about 1/8 inch thick, behaves much the same way.
- Patty-pansSmall shallow tins for individual pastries, roughly what we call tartlet tins or a mini muffin pan. If lining them, prick the bases and weight them with paper and beans, or the bottoms will dome.
- Wine-glass and biscuit cutterA 2 1/2 inch round cutter for the base with about 1 1/2 inches for the inner hole leaves a ring roughly half an inch wide; a 3 inch cutter over the same center gives a wider ring.
- Stacking the ringsTwo rings on one solid round gives a case with usable depth. Brush the ring undersides with water or egg white so they stay put, and avoid egg wash on the cut edges, which glues the layers shut.
- The meringue proportionOne tablespoon of sugar per white is a soft, lightly sweet meringue by modern standards, where two tablespoons is typical. It browns quickly: 5-8 minutes at 350F, or a minute or two under the broiler, watching it.
- Oyster pattiesIf filling with the oyster mixture the note implies, cook the oysters only until their edges ruffle, a couple of minutes. Longer, and they turn rubbery inside the pastry.
- YieldA pound of puff pastry rolled thin gives roughly 12 to 16 small shells, depending on your cutter. Baked cases keep a day in a tin and can be crisped briefly in the oven before filling.
Tart shells of this kind belong to the nineteenth-century tea table, where a tray of small filled pastries did the work of a dessert course without requiring a formal pudding. The word patty-pan and the dish name patty are generally traced to the French pâté, a filled pastry case, and by the 1800s an English or American patty usually meant a little shell of puff paste with a savory filling, oysters being the standard American choice wherever they were cheap and plentiful. That the same shell is offered here for both oysters and jelly-with-meringue is characteristic of The Dixie Cook-Book and its contemporaries: pastry chapters taught a technique and then listed the uses, leaving the cook to decide whether the evening called for supper or sweets. The reliance on a glass and a wine-glass as cutters is a reminder that improvised cutters were an ordinary part of this kind of kitchen work.