Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Lemon Tarts
Lemon Tarts
Mrs. Edward Thomas.
Mix well together the juice and grated rind of two lemons two cups of sugar, two eggs, and the crumbs of sponge cake; beat it all together until smooth; put into twelve patty pans lined with puff paste, and bake until the crust is done.
A thrifty tart filling built on stale sponge cake rather than butter or cornstarch. The original assumes you know what a patty pan is and have cake going dry on the shelf.
- Patty pansSmall individual tart tins, roughly 2 to 3 inches across. A standard 12-cup muffin tin lined with rounds of puff pastry does the same job.
- The cake crumbs are unmeasuredThe one genuine gap in the recipe. Two cups of sugar and two eggs need a fair amount of crumb to become a spreadable filling rather than a syrup; a cup to a cup and a half of sponge crumbs, added gradually until the mixture holds its shape on the spoon, is a reasonable starting point. Drier crumbs will absorb the lemon juice better than fresh, moist cake.
- SugarTwo cups for twelve small tarts is very sweet by current taste. One to one and a half cups, tasted against the juice, gives a filling closer to modern lemon curd.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none, only "bake until the crust is done." For modern puff pastry, 400-425F for about 20 to 25 minutes works: bake until the pastry is browned and the filling is set and no longer wet in the centre.
- Puff pasteFrozen all-butter puff pastry substitutes directly. Cut rounds a little larger than the cups, press in, and chill the lined tins while the oven heats so the pastry does not slump.
- Grating the rindTake only the coloured zest. The white pith beneath turns bitter, and with this much sugar and so little fat there is nothing to mask it.
- YieldTwelve small tarts, one or two per person as a tea sweet rather than a dessert course.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1874) was one of the first great American charity compilations — recipes solicited from named local women, printed with their names attached, and sold to raise money for Chicago's Home for the Friendless. Mrs. Edward Thomas's tarts belong to a long line of British and American lemon fillings sometimes called lemon cheese or lemon cheesecake, in which no cheese appears; these are more usually a butter-and-egg curd, though in some versions, as here, the body comes from breadcrumbs, biscuit, or the crumbs of a sponge cake past its best. Using up stale cake was ordinary domestic economy, not a novelty, and the cookbooks of the period are full of second lives for it: crumb puddings, trifles, charlottes, and fillings like this one. The odd section heading, "Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen," if it stands as reported, reflects how these books were assembled — recipes packed in beneath comic sketches and household essays, with no particular regard for whether the two had anything to do with each other.