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Apricot Tartlets
Lightly butter six small, scalloped tartlet moulds. Have a pie paste prepared. Then with a paste cutter cut out six equal, round pieces and neatly line the moulds with them. Gently press the paste with the thumb at the bottom and sides of the moulds, but avoid pressing the paste at the edges. Fill the tartlet moulds with dried beans and place in the oven for fifteen minutes. Remove from the oven; drop the beans into a tin box, keeping them for similar purposes in the future.
Open and cut a pint can of fine apricots into thin, equal slices. Spread at the bottom of each mould a good teaspoonful apple marmalade, then carefully fill the tartlets with the apricots equally divided; dredge a light teaspoon powdered sugar over each; lay them on a baking sheet, then place in a moderate oven for sixteen minutes. Bring them to the oven door, besprinkle the edges of each mould with a little powdered sugar; return them to the oven for two minutes to let the sugar thoroughly melt. Remove from the oven, let cool off, then spread over the apricots a teaspoon currant jelly. Dress on a dish and serve.
A straightforward French-style tartlet, written when canned apricots were a modern convenience and every pastry cook kept a tin of baking beans. A few of the instructions assume equipment and pantry items that need translating.
- Oven temperatures"A moderate oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. The recipe gives no temperature at all for the initial blind bake; a hotter oven, nearer 400F, is one way to set the shells in fifteen minutes, but that is a modern inference rather than anything the text states.
- Blind bakingModern practice is to line each shell with a round of parchment or foil before adding the beans, which the original omits. Without a liner the beans stick to the raw paste and pull holes in it when tipped out.
- The beansDried beans used this way can be reused many times, though they eventually dry out and crack, and they are no longer good for eating after a few bakings. The tin box is a sound idea; label it so they do not end up in a soup.
- Apple marmaladeNot marmalade in the citrus sense. This is a thick, reduced apple pur ee, close to what is sold as apple butter, or an apple sauce cooked down until it mounds on the spoon; period apple marmalade would generally have been sweetened. A loose sauce will soak the base.
- A pint can of apricotsRoughly a standard 15 to 16 oz can of apricot halves in syrup. Drain them well and pat dry before slicing, or the syrup will thin the marmalade and slacken the pastry.
- The mouldsScalloped tartlet moulds came in various sizes; small ones of roughly 2 to 3 inches across are the usual modern stand-in. Fluted tart tins of that size work; press the paste into the flutes gently, and leave the rim alone as instructed so it does not thin and burn.
- The sugar on the edgesThe two-minute return to the oven is meant to melt the sugar to a glaze, as the recipe says, not to caramelise it. Watch it, since powdered sugar on an exposed edge colours fast.
- The currant jellySpread it on shells that are properly cool. Warming and stirring the jelly briefly makes it spreadable without melting into the fruit; on a warm tartlet it simply runs off.
- YieldSix tartlets, one per person as a dessert course. They are at their best the day they are made, since the pastry softens overnight.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the book's method-first, mould-by-mould precision is restaurant training written out for a domestic reader. The technique of lining moulds and weighting them with dried beans, what English kitchens call baking blind, was already old by then. What dates the recipe is the pint can of apricots, called for without apology: by the early 1900s American commercial canning, much of it Californian, had made good stone fruit an all-year ingredient. The apple marmalade sealing the base and the currant jelly glazing the top are both classic French patisserie moves, borrowed to keep juice out of the pastry and to give the finished tartlet a shine.