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Green-Gage Tartlets
Carefully split fifteen canned green gages and remove the stones. Have three ounces powdered sugar and one gill cold water in a saucepan and boil for five minutes; then add the green gages and cook for ten minutes. Place them in a bowl and proceed to prepare the tartlets.
This is a filling, not a finished pastry — the original assumes you have tartlet shells and a recipe for them elsewhere in the book. A few notes on the measurements and on what canned fruit does under ten minutes of heat.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. With three ounces of sugar (about six tablespoons) this makes a fairly heavy syrup that will thicken further as it reduces.
- Powdered sugarIn a book of this vintage this means finely granulated or caster sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will cloud the syrup. Ordinary granulated dissolves perfectly well in a boiling syrup.
- Green gagesGreengages are a small green-gold dessert plum, sold canned as a staple a century ago and rarely stocked now. Canned or bottled Reine Claude plums from a European grocer are the closest thing; fresh greengages in late summer, or firm underripe yellow plums, will also work but need a few minutes longer in the syrup.
- The ten minutesCanned fruit has already been cooked in the tin. Ten minutes at a boil will reduce halved gages to pulp. Two or three minutes at a bare simmer is enough to glaze them and take up the syrup; lift the fruit out and reduce the syrup separately if you want it thicker.
- Splitting and stoningCanned gages are usually packed whole with stones in. Split along the natural seam with a paring knife and flick the stone out — cling-type plums will fight you, so work over a bowl to catch the juice.
- The shellsThe book's own short crust and tartlet instructions are elsewhere; bake the shells blind in small tartlet tins until dry and pale gold, and fill only when both shells and fruit are cool, or the pastry will go soft within minutes.
- YieldFifteen plums split gives thirty halves -- enough for ten to fifteen tartlets at two or three halves each, with the reduced syrup brushed over as a glaze.
Greengages are the plum the French call Reine Claude, generally said to be named for Claude of France, queen to Francis I; the English name is traditionally traced to Sir William Gage, who is credited with bringing the trees to England in the early eighteenth century after their labels were lost in transit. Greengages bruise easily, keep badly and have a short season, and by the time this book was compiled the fruit often reached American kitchens in a tin rather than off a tree. A tartlet filling that begins "carefully split fifteen canned green gages" is a small record of how far the commercial cannery had entered the professional kitchen, and of a habit of treating tinned fruit as a raw material to be re-cooked in fresh syrup rather than spooned out as it came.