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Raspberry Tartlets
Prepare six tartlet crusts. Place in a saucepan two ounces sugar, with two gills water, half teaspoon vanilla essence and three tablespoons brandy, add a pint fresh, well-picked raspberries, mix well and let boil five minutes. Lift up raspberries with a skimmer, arrange them on the crusts, evenly divided. Reduce syrup on fire to half the quantity then divide over tartlets, sprinkle a little shredded cocoanut over and serve.
A straightforward fruit tartlet whose only real trap is the five-minute boil. Raspberries hold their shape for barely a minute in hot syrup, so treat the timing loosely and the rest of the recipe works as written.
- The hinge: don't boil the berriesFive minutes in boiling syrup reduces fresh raspberries to seedy pulp that cannot be lifted out with a skimmer. Bring the syrup to a boil first, slide the berries in off the heat or at a bare simmer for about a minute, then lift them out and reduce the syrup on its own.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of water is one cup. Reduced by half at the end, that gives roughly half a cup of syrup for six tartlets.
- Two ounces sugarWeight, not volume: about 1/4 cup granulated. The syrup is deliberately thin and tart rather than jam-sweet.
- Tartlet crustsThe recipe assumes these are already made and baked, since nothing else here bakes; it gives no pastry, size or oven detail, so use whatever small pre-baked shell you would normally make, fully cooled before filling.
- Vanilla essence and brandyEssence here means extract. The three tablespoons of brandy will not fully cook off in a short boil, which is intentional in a book of this vintage but worth knowing if serving children.
- Shredded cocoanutDesiccated coconut of the period was generally drier and often less sweet than the sweetened flake sold today. Unsweetened shred, or lightly toasted coconut, keeps the balance the recipe seems to intend.
- Assembly and timingFill as close to serving as possible. The syrup will soften a baked shell fairly quickly, and there is no pastry cream or jam glaze here to act as a barrier.
- YieldSix small tartlets, one per person as a light dessert. A pint of raspberries is about 12 ounces.
Tartlets of this kind belong to the late nineteenth-century pastry repertoire that professional cooks carried between hotel kitchens in Paris, London and New York, where a cold baked shell, a poached or syruped fruit and a reduced glaze could be assembled at speed for service. The International Cook Book, compiled by the chef Alexander Filippini, gathers dishes of this kind, and its habit of measuring liquid in gills and sugar in ounces seems to reflect a kitchen still working from professional habit rather than standardized American cups. The brandy is not decoration: spirits were often used to lift a fruit syrup before commercial fruit concentrates and stabilizers, and the sprinkle of shredded coconut marks the period's enthusiasm for a then-fashionable imported ingredient, said to have arrived in American groceries in quantity in the closing decades of the century.