No. 3402

Apricot Tartlets

Tartelettes d'Abricots

Pound one pound of almonds with three pounds of sugar, a quarter of a pound of vanilla sugar (No. 3165) and ten to twelve egg-whites; make a fine and firm paste. Roll this out with the rolling-pin to one-eighth of an inch in thickness, and with it line some small hollow tartlet molds; unmold on a baking sheet and let dry well in the heater. Fill the insides of the small tartlets with reduced apricot marmalade (No. 3675), and glaze with apricot fondant (No. 58).

← No. 3401 Vanilla Sticks Fancy Cakes — Petits Fours No. 3403 Strawberry Tartlets →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer is writing for a pastry brigade, so the batch is enormous and the cross-references do half the work. The paste itself is a macaroon-type almond paste, and its handling is the whole difficulty.

Scale it down firstOne pound of almonds, three pounds of sugar and ten to twelve whites make a very large batch of small tartlets, likely well over a hundred, though the recipe gives no yield. A quarter of the recipe — 4 oz almonds, 12 oz sugar, 1 oz vanilla sugar, 3 egg whites — is a sensible home batch.
The sugar ratio is deliberateThree parts sugar to one part almonds looks wrong beside modern marzipan, which runs closer to equal parts. The extra sugar is what makes the paste firm enough to roll thin and hold a mold shape without a flour structure. Do not reduce it or the shells will slump.
"Pound" means a fine paste, not chopped nutsBlanched almonds ground in a food processor with some of the sugar will substitute for the mortar. Add the whites a little at a time; you want a stiff, workable paste, so hold some back rather than committing to all twelve.
Vanilla sugarRanhofer's No. 3165 is simply sugar pounded and sifted with vanilla beans. A week in a jar with a split bean, then sifted, gives the same thing; a quarter pound to three pounds of sugar is a light perfume, not a dominant flavour.
"Let dry well in the heater"Ranhofer's 'heater' is the warm drying cupboard of the French kitchen (the étuve), used to set almond pastes without colouring them. The book gives no temperature; something in the region of 120–160F is the usual modern equivalent. A home oven with only the pilot or light on, or the lowest setting with the door ajar, approximates it.
Better to bake themDrying alone leaves the egg white in the shells barely cooked. Fifteen to twenty minutes at 300F will set the paste firm and pale without browning the edges.
Reduced apricot marmaladeNo. 3675 is apricot pulp cooked down with sugar until it mounds on the spoon. Ordinary apricot jam boiled a few minutes and sieved works; it must be thick, or it will weep under the glaze.
Apricot fondantNo. 58 is poured fondant flavoured and tinted with apricot. Warm it to about 100F — hand-warm, never hot — so it flows and sets glossy. Overheated fondant dries dull and grainy.
Molds and unmoldingThe small hollow tartlet molds are shallow tinned tartlet tins; the rolled sheet of paste is laid in to line them, then turned out onto the baking sheet so the shell dries free-standing.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in a long run of petits fours — vanilla sticks before it, strawberry tartlets after — each a variation on the same handful of base preparations, identified by number. That numbering is the book's real signature: it assumes a kitchen where fondant, apricot marmalade and vanilla sugar are standing stock, made in quantity by someone else, so the recipe for a finished sweet can be four lines long. The tartlet itself belongs to the French tradition of almond-paste petits fours secs, close kin to the shells used for petits fours glacés, and apricot was the default fruit for glazing and filling in nineteenth-century pastry work because it reduces to a firm, brightly acid paste that holds its colour under sugar.