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Macedoine Tartlets
Lightly butter six individual tartlet moulds. Roll out very thin on lightly floured table half pound pie paste. Cut out six round pieces of equal size, half an inch larger in diameter than the moulds. Nicely arrange the paste in the moulds, pressing well around the edges, then fill them with white beans (dried); place them in a tin and bake in the oven for ten minutes. Remove, let cool off, remove the beans and detach the tartlets from the moulds. Cut into small pieces one sound, peeled and seeded apple, one sound, peeled and seeded orange, six strawberries, twelve stewed canned cherries, one peach and two plums; place in a bowl with three tablespoons currant jelly, one tablespoon good maraschino and two tablespoons fine sugar; mix well with a wooden spoon for two minutes, then fill the tartlets with the fruit and serve.
A blind-baked shell filled with dressed raw fruit — the assembly is trivial, but the pastry step as written is under-timed and the glaze depends on one ingredient modern shoppers usually get wrong.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Blind-baking small tart shells wants a hot oven, 400-425F, so the pastry sets before the butter runs.
- Ten minutes is not enoughTen minutes with the beans in only sets the sides. Once the beans come out the shells will likely need a further spell uncovered to colour and dry the base, or the fruit juices will soften them straight through.
- Maraschino means the liqueurA clear, dry cherry liqueur distilled from marasca cherries — not the syrup from a jar of neon cocktail cherries. Kirsch is the closest substitute.
- Half a pound of pie paste8 oz of finished dough, which is generous for six small moulds; a standard single-crust batch. Roll thin, as directed, and the trimmings will be considerable.
- The beans are reusableDried white beans here are pie weights. Keep them in a jar and reuse them for many bakings; they will never cook to edibility after a few turns in the oven.
- Currant jellyUnderstood in this period as red currant jelly. Warming and stirring it smooth first will help it blend with the fruit rather than sitting in lumps.
- Fill at the last momentThe fruit is macerated in sugar and liqueur and will weep. Fill the shells as they go to the table, not in advance.
- YieldSix tartlets, one per person as a dessert course.
Macédoine is French kitchen shorthand for a mixture of things cut to a uniform small dice — vegetables in a savoury context, fruit in a sweet one. The name is generally traced to the ethnic patchwork of the historical region of Macedonia, a joke about mixed populations that stuck to the plate; it appears in French culinary usage well before this book. The particular charm of the version here is its indifference to season: an apple, an orange, strawberries, a peach, two plums and a tin of stewed cherries would have been an awkward set to gather fresh all at once, and the recipe cheerfully mixes canned with raw. That suggests, arguably, a hotel kitchen rather than a household one — he cooked at Delmonico's in New York, and the tartlet is exactly the sort of small, pretty, made-to-order sweet a large restaurant could assemble from whatever the larder held.