No. 3334

Peach Tartlets with Rice

Tartelettes de Peches au Riz

Prepare a fine foundation paste (No. 135); line some tartlet molds, cover the bottoms with a little apple marmalade (No. 3674), and fill the molds level to the top with rice with cream flavored with vanilla (No. 160), then bake them. As soon as done unmold and lay a compoted half peach on top (No. 3691), placing a circle of meringue points all around; bestrew with sugar, and push in a slack oven in order to color the meringue lightly, and afterward cover the peaches with a light syrup.

← No. 3333 Herisson Tartlets Small Cakes for Entremets No. 3335 Pelerine Tartlets →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in cross-references, assuming you have his numbered preparations to hand. Read as a set of four components — pastry shell, apple marmalade, vanilla rice, poached peach — assembled and finished under meringue.

The cross-referenced partsNo. 135 foundation paste (pâte à foncer) is a short lining pastry; any all-butter tart dough works. No. 3674 apple marmalade is apples cooked down to a thick, spreadable purée with sugar, stiffer than applesauce. No. 160 is Ranhofer's 'rice with cream,' rice cooked in sweetened milk, here flavoured with vanilla, and No. 3691 is compoted peach halves, poached in syrup.
Slack oven'Slack' is the coolest working setting of a period range, generally reckoned somewhere around 250-300°F, though the term is imprecise. It is used here only to set and faintly tint the meringue without collapsing the peach or drying the rice.
Baking the shellsThe recipe says only 'bake them,' with no oven specified. The rice filling is already cooked, so the bake is about setting the pastry rather than the filling.
Meringue pointsA circle of small piped peaks or rosettes of meringue set around the peach, not a covering. The tartlets are unmolded as soon as they are done and finished at once; dust with sugar and colour only lightly.
Bestrew with sugarSimply strew or sprinkle a fine dusting of sugar over the meringue before it goes into the oven, so it colours lightly.
The light syrupThe peach poaching liquid reduced slightly, or a thin sugar syrup, brushed over the fruit after the meringue is set. It is a glaze for shine, not a sauce; apply it warm and sparingly so it does not run into the meringue.
Yield and servingFigure one tartlet per person; no mold size is given. Assemble the same day, and serve as one of the 'small cakes for entremets' the heading places it among.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this tartlet is characteristic of its method: nothing is made from scratch on the page, everything is assembled from numbered preparations already standing in a professional kitchen. Rice cooked in sweetened, vanilla-scented milk was a staple of the nineteenth-century French repertoire — the base of riz à l'impératrice and a dozen moulded rice entremets — and pairing it with poached stone fruit under meringue follows the same logic as the better-known peach Melba, which Escoffier is generally credited with composing in London around the same decade. Peaches compoted in syrup would also have been available to a hotel kitchen outside the short fresh-peach season.