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Apple Tartlets
Lightly butter six individual tartlet moulds. Roll out on a lightly floured table a half pound pie paste to one-fifth inch in thickness. With a pastry cutter cut out six pieces a shade larger than the moulds, line tartlets with paste, then neatly spread a teaspoon apple jelly at bottom of each. Cut four apples in quarters, peel and core, then finely slice. Place in a bowl, with an ounce powdered sugar, two saltspoons cinnamon in powder and half teaspoon vanilla essence, turn well in seasoning, evenly place in the six moulds and set in oven for thirty minutes. Remove, spread another teaspoon apple jelly over surface of each, take up from moulds, dress on a dish with folded napkin, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve.
A straightforward French-style tartlet, but the original assumes you know the oven setting and reads the sugar differently than we do.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Pastry shells with a raw apple filling want a hot start, 400F, so the base sets before the fruit weeps; thirty minutes at that heat should color the apples at the edges.
- Powdered sugarIn 1911 kitchens this meant finely ground granulated sugar, what we call caster or superfine, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar in a modern box. Caster works throughout; confectioners' sugar is acceptable only for the dusting at the end.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of cinnamon is half a teaspoon for four apples, which is restrained by current taste.
- An ounce of sugarAbout two tablespoons by volume for the whole batch. With sweet dessert apples that is enough; with a sharp cooking apple you may want half again as much.
- Pastry quantityHalf a pound of pie paste is roughly one standard single-crust batch. Rolled to one-fifth inch, about 5 mm, it is thicker than most modern tart pastry and will hold up to the wet fruit.
- Slice the apples thinly and pack themRaw apple loses a good deal of volume in half an hour. Finely sliced means near-translucent, layered and pressed down, or the tartlets will sink and look meagre.
- The jelly, twiceThe teaspoon at the bottom seals the pastry against fruit juice; the teaspoon on top is a glaze, and it spreads far better if warmed and brushed on while the tartlets are hot.
- UnmouldingLoosen while warm but not scalding. Cold apple jelly welds the pastry to tinned moulds.
- YieldSix tartlets, one per person, served warm.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, the work of a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the training: individual moulds, a jelly seal under the fruit, a glaze over it, and service on a folded napkin, all standard professional French practice transplanted to an American household book. The apple tartlet itself is a domestic reduction of the tarte aux pommes, and the two spoonfuls of apple jelly do the work that a pastry cream or an apricot nappage would do in a restaurant kitchen, waterproofing the shell and giving the finished top a shine. The folded napkin is worth noticing as a period marker: it is generally taken to have kept the pastry from sliding on a silver dish, and it seems to signal a table set to service rules that were apparently still current when the book was published and largely gone a generation later.