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Pineapple Tartlets
Peel, carefully remove all the eyes and pare the stalks of a small, sound pineapple. Cut into quarters, then into very fine slices. Place the pieces in a saucepan with two ounces sugar, two tablespoons good Jamaica rum and three gills cold water. Set the pan on the fire, mix well for half minute, then cook for fifteen minutes. Remove from the fire and let cool off. Prepare six individual tartlets, Fill with the pineapple preparation. Finely chop up a quarter pound peeled almonds and sprinkle over. Place the tartlets in the oven to bake for five minutes. Remove, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A straightforward compote baked into pastry shells, but the original assumes you already have baked tartlet cases on hand and gives no oven temperature. Two details need attention: the liquid quantity and the state of the shells.
- GillsThree gills is 1.5 cups (about 355 ml) by American measure, 15 fl oz if you are reading it as British gills. Either way it is a generous quantity of liquid, and fifteen minutes of simmering will reduce it considerably.
- The shells are already bakedThe shells are almost certainly already baked -- "Prepare six individual tartlets" is not spelled out, but the five minutes in the oven at the end will only set the filling and toast the almonds; it will not cook raw pastry, so line and bake the cases first.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A hot oven, 400F, for those final five minutes will colour the almonds without drying the fruit. Watch them, as chopped almonds go from gold to bitter quickly.
- Drain before fillingLet the pineapple cool in its syrup, then lift the fruit out with a slotted spoon and fill the shells with that. Spoon the syrup over sparingly, or boil it down separately to a glaze; poured in wholesale it will soften the pastry.
- Choosing the fruitA "small, sound" pineapple should be fragrant at the base and heavy for its size. Remove the fibrous core along with the eyes; it never softens in fifteen minutes and is unpleasant in a tartlet.
- AlmondsA quarter pound of chopped almonds over six small tartlets is a heavy blanket by modern taste. Two ounces is plenty, and blanched slivered almonds do the same job with less chopping.
- RumTwo tablespoons of Jamaica rum in a pan that then simmers a quarter of an hour will leave mostly aroma behind. A dark pot-still Jamaican rum suits the phrase "good Jamaica rum" better than a light white one, which will barely register.
- YieldSix tartlets, served warm or at room temperature. The folded napkin on the serving dish is a service-era convention for presenting pastry.
Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book in 1906 as a survey of dishes from everywhere a Gilded Age dining room might borrow from. Fresh pineapple was still a mark of some expense in the northern United States, though far from the eighteenth-century luxury it had been: steamer traffic from Cuba and the Caribbean had brought whole fruit within reach of a well-off household by the 1900s, and canned pineapple was arriving alongside it. Jamaica rum and pineapple came up the same shipping lanes, and dark rum was one of the flavouring spirits used in American professional kitchens of the period.