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Italian Tarts
(Turin.) Have ready six sponge cakes, tall and round, like tarts, scoop out the centres, and roll the outsides in jam, then in chopped nuts. Fill with a half a peach, preserved or stewed, free from juice, on top of a layer of sweetened whipped cream. Serve cold, for afternoon tea or dessert.
An assembly recipe rather than a baking one: the only real work is having the right sponge shapes and keeping everything dry enough to hold together.
- "Sponge cakes, tall and round, like tarts"Presumably individual sponges baked in deep round moulds; the size is not given, though a cake that takes half a peach in its hollow would be something like a large muffin. Possible modern equivalents are a plain sponge or génoise baked in a muffin tin or dariole moulds, or bought sponge flan cases if they are deep enough to hollow.
- Scooping the centresA small paring knife will cut a cone that lifts out, leaving a wall thick enough to hold; the recipe gives no thickness. Slightly stale cake is easier to cut than fresh sponge, which tends to tear and compress.
- The jam coatingWarm the jam and sieve out any lumps or fruit pieces so it brushes on as a thin, even glue. The recipe does not say which jam; apricot or red currant are the usual glazing jams. A stiff, cold jam will drag the crumb off the sides.
- Chopped nutsChop them fine and press the cake into them while the jam is still tacky. Toasting the nuts first, though not specified, gives a much better flavour against sweet sponge and cream.
- "Free from juice" is the hingePreserved peach halves must be drained and blotted dry. Any syrup left clinging will soak through the whipped cream and into the sponge wall, and the tarts will not hold their shape for long.
- The creamWhip to firm peaks, not soft — this is structural, not a garnish. Sweeten lightly, since jam, nuts and preserved peach are already sugary.
- Yield and timingSix tarts, one per person. The recipe says only to serve cold; being cream-filled and jam-coated, they are best assembled shortly before serving rather than well in advance.
The bare parenthetical "(Turin.)" stands in for a source. Whether anything quite like this was standard in Piedmont is another matter: the combination of hollowed sponge, jam, nuts, whipped cream and preserved fruit is the common European grammar of the individual pastry. What the recipe does record is the afternoon tea table, where small assembled sweets built from bought or day-old sponge let a household produce something that looked like patisserie without a pastry cook. The instruction to serve cold suggests that cream-filled sponges of this kind were made close to the hour they were eaten.