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Pear Tartlets
Remove stems and peel six fresh, ripe, good-sized pears, cut in halves, remove seeds, cut in quarter-inch slices and place on a plate. Season with a teaspoon sugar, a half teaspoon vanilla essence tablespoon kirsch or maraschino, turn well in seasoning and let infuse till required. Prepare six tartlet crusts. Remove the beans from the crusts and thoroughly wipe them. Evenly divide the pears into the six tartlets, then set in oven for ten minutes. Remove, spread a teaspoon currant jelly over each. Dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A short French-style pastry course written for cooks who already knew how to line and blind-bake tartlet moulds. The instructions assume that groundwork, so most of the modern work is in filling the gaps.
- The beans are baking beans"Remove the beans from the crusts" means the tartlet shells have already been lined with paper and dried beans and baked blind. The book gives no temperature; in a modern oven roughly 375-400F, until the pastry is set and lightly coloured, will do. Lift out the beans and paper, and wipe any crumbs or grit from the inside before filling.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Because the shells are already cooked, the ten minutes is only to warm the fruit and take the raw edge off it; around 400F is a reasonable modern equivalent, and watch the pastry rims rather than the clock.
- Pears must be ripe but firmQuarter-inch slices of a rock-hard pear will not soften in ten minutes, and an overripe one collapses to sauce. Bartlett, Anjou or Comice at the point where the neck yields to a thumb is the target.
- The seasoning is a light scenting, not a syrupOne teaspoon of sugar and a tablespoon of spirit for six pears is deliberately restrained; the sweetness comes from the jelly at the end. Taste the fruit and add sugar only if the pears are genuinely tart.
- A missing word in the textThe line reads "a half teaspoon vanilla essence tablespoon kirsch or maraschino"; a word appears to have dropped out, an "a" or "and a". Read it as a half teaspoon of vanilla extract plus one tablespoon of kirsch or maraschino liqueur.
- Maraschino means the liqueurNot the syrup from a jar of bright red cherries. Use a dry maraschino such as Luxardo, or kirsch; either gives the faint bitter-almond note that carries pear.
- Currant jelly as glazeRed currant jelly spread on hot tartlets slackens into a thin glaze. If yours is stiff, warm it with a few drops of water and brush it on rather than spooning it in cold lumps.
- Yield and serviceSix tartlets, one per person, meant as a dessert or a light sweet course. The folded napkin on the serving dish is period presentation, and it keeps the pastry from sliding. A warm plate does the same job.
This is a standard restaurant tartlet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, built on the French pâtisserie logic of a blind-baked shell filled at the last moment and finished with a jelly glaze -- a formula applied interchangeably to pears, apricots, strawberries and cherries. Kirsch and maraschino, both cherry-derived and both carrying a bitter-almond edge from the stones, were conventional flavourings for cooked stone and orchard fruit in that tradition. *The International Cook Book* (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the brevity here is characteristic: he wrote for people who had lined a tartlet mould many times and needed only the filling and the finish. The folded napkin belongs to the formal service of the period.