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Kickshaws
Some rich pastry I beaten egg Apple jelly Pinch of salt I heaping tablespoonful 1/2 teaspoonful lemon exbutter tract I heaping tablespoonful 3 tablespoonfuls flour sugar Line some tartlet tins with pastry. Put one teaspoonful of apply jelly into each. Cream the butter and sugar together, add the egg, salt, lemon extract and flour. Mix and divide into the tartlet tins. Bake in a hot oven for fifteen minutes. Sift a little sugar over the top and serve hot or cold. "Kickshaws" were made in Shakespeare's time.
The ingredient list has come through the scanner as two interleaved columns, so read it as: rich pastry; apple jelly; 1 heaping tablespoon butter; 1 heaping tablespoon sugar; 1 beaten egg; a pinch of salt; 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract; 3 tablespoons flour. What follows is essentially a jam tartlet under a thin almond-less frangipane-style batter.
- Hot oven"Hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat fifteen minutes should suit tartlets in small tins; the filling should be set and just golden, and the pastry edges browned.
- YieldThe quantities given are small. One heaping tablespoon each of butter and sugar with one egg and 3 tablespoons flour will probably fill about six to eight tartlet tins of roughly 2 inches, or fewer slightly larger ones. Scale up if you want more than a plateful.
- "Heaping tablespoonful"Read these generously: nearer 3/4 oz (20 g) butter than the 14 g of a level spoon, and a rounded tablespoon of sugar, closer to 20 g than 12 g. Because the batter is thin and eggy, small variations here matter less than not overfilling the shells.
- Don't overfillThe teaspoon of jelly plus the batter will rise and boil slightly. Fill each shell no more than two-thirds; jelly that escapes over the rim welds the tartlet to the tin.
- Apple jellyClear apple jelly is still sold, but any firm, fairly tart jelly works, quince and crabapple especially. Avoid a loose jam, which will thin out and run under the topping.
- Lemon extractHalf a teaspoon of extract is the period equivalent of flavouring; the zest of half a lemon gives a cleaner result if you would rather.
- Rich pastryThe book assumes you have a rich short crust on hand. Chill the lined tins before filling so the shells hold their shape in a fast oven, and blind baking is unnecessary at this temperature and size.
- ServingSift the sugar over while the tartlets are still warm so it clings. They are better the day they are made; the pastry softens under the jelly overnight.
"Kickshaw" is an English mangling of the French quelque chose — "something or other" — and it entered the language in the sixteenth century as a half-mocking word for a small fancy dish, the sort of thing served for show rather than sustenance. Shakespeare uses it in 2 Henry IV, where Justice Shallow, ordering supper from Davy, calls for "any pretty little tiny kickshaws," and the note at the end of this recipe is trading on exactly that association: an old word lends a plain jam tartlet an air of antiquity. In practice a kickshaw was never one fixed dish, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cookery books apply the term to all sorts of pastry trifles and made dishes.