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Tartlets, Patissiere
Prepare a creme patissiere. Scald in boiling water for two minutes two ounces almonds, drain, peel, and finely chop, then place in oven on a tin until they obtain a nice brown colour, tossing them once in a while. Remove and add to creme, stir well and keep till required.
Lightly butter six tartlet moulds. Roll out on a lightly floured table a half pound pie paste to one-sixth-inch thickness. With pastry cutter a shade longer than top of moulds cut six pieces and line tartlets with them, then line inside of each with a piece of buttered paper, fill up with dried beans and place in oven for twenty minutes. Remove, take out beans and paper, fill up with creme and nicely smooth surface, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over, then set in oven for eight minutes. Remove, lift up from moulds, dress on dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A professional's shorthand: the recipe assumes you already have crème pâtissière on hand and that your oven has one useful setting. Both need filling in.
- The custard is not given hereThe entry simply calls for crème pâtissière as something already prepared. Use any standard pastry cream — milk, sugar, egg yolks, flour or cornstarch, vanilla — cooked until it thickens and boils for a minute to cook out the starch, then chilled with a film of butter or plastic on the surface. Roughly 1½ cups should be enough for six tartlets.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names no temperature, only 'in oven'. For blind baking the shells, about 400F for the twenty minutes stated works. The final eight-minute pass is only to set and lightly colour the surface: 400F again, or briefly under a broiler if you want the sugar to glaze.
- Toasting the almondsScald, peel and chop, then toast on a sheet pan at 350F for 8-12 minutes, tossing once or twice. Chopped nuts colour quickly at the edges; pull them when they smell nutty rather than waiting for deep brown, and cool them before folding into the cold cream or they will slacken it.
- Buttered paper and beansThis is blind baking. Parchment does the job of the buttered paper, and pie weights or rice work as well as dried beans. Beans used this way are no longer good to eat but will serve as weights for many further bakings.
- Pastry thickness and cutterOne-sixth inch is a shade over 4 mm — thin but not tissue. The cutter should be wider than the mould top, not longer, so the disc drops in and up the sides without stretching; stretched pastry shrinks down the mould wall as it bakes.
- Half a pound of pie pasteThat is roughly the weight of a single-crust batch, about 225 g of finished dough. The recipe does not give a mould size; half a pound should comfortably line six small tartlet moulds.
- Powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar, sifted over the smoothed cream in a thin veil. Too heavy a coat weeps into syrup rather than colouring.
- Yield and serviceSix tartlets, one per person, and the text implies they go straight from the oven to the table. The folded napkin on the dish is period presentation.
Crème pâtissière — literally the pastry cook's cream — is the flour-thickened egg custard that underpins most of the classic French filled pastry repertoire, and it was so standard in professional kitchens that a recipe like this one could name it in three words and move on. What is being described here is the ordinary tartlet of a hotel or restaurant pastry section: shells baked blind in individual moulds so they can be filled and finished to order, a scatter of toasted almonds to give the cream a flavour and a texture, a dusting of sugar caught briefly by the oven heat. The entry's telegraphic style is typical of books written by working chefs for other cooks rather than for householders; it assumes a stack of tartlet moulds, a bowl of pie paste and a pot of cream already to hand, and treats the assembly as the only part worth writing down.