Queen of Tarts
September 8th, 2011
I guess I do make a lot of tart shells. This week alone, I’ve baked nine batches, a grand total of 204 shells. Don’t laugh, there were extenuating circumstances. And I only kept one set for myself. We’re still eating them — three of the dozen were filled with cheese and glazed onions. The rest have been slowly but surely spread with raspberry jam and eaten for elevenses (I can’t seem to get through a morning at work without a cuppa and a nibble) or for dessert.
Here’s tonight’s ration. I took mine with a mango black tea latte. He had his with a mug of China green tips. After these, there are just two more.
I can’t tell you how thrilled I was when someone asked for my tart shell receipt yesterday. So here it is, in all it’s glaring modernity.
Not-19th-Century Tart Shells
Makes 24 mini shells, or 12 standard-cupcake size shells.1 cup flour
1 stick butter
3 oz cream cheeseBring butter and cream cheese to room temperature — they will be very soft. Blend butter and cream cheese with a fork or a mixer. Whip a few seconds, until very smooth. Sift in the flour and mix with a fork or pastry blender. Form a ball of dough as soon as you can, adding a little flour if needed. The less you work the dough, the more tender the result!
Wrap the ball of dough in a plastic bag and let it rest in the refrigerator for at least an hour, or up to 24. Cut in half, and in half again. If you’re making mini shells, cut each piece once more in half, for a total of 8. Pull each of the four, or eight, pieces of dough into three parts. Put the little balls of dough into an ungreased muffin tin. Using your finger, spread the dough to cover the bottom and sides of each muffin. You may need to let the dough warm up a little to make it easier to spread.
Prick the bottom of each shell with a fork. Bake at about 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes, or until the edges are golden brown.
This is a totally modern recipe. I found it on the internet a few years ago, shortly after I began catering tea parties. It is fail-safe, quick, and easy. Also, it produces a tender, rich, flaky crust. Butter alone is harder to manage, and always seems a little tough. My Gram, whose pie crusts are legendary for their blue-blooded delicacy, taught me to use Crisco. But after the whole hydrogenation scandal, I’ve tried to avoid it.
How did they manage in the 19th century, you ask? Surely they didn’t just endure tough “paste” (Victorian for pie crust) until the advent of Crisco? They used lard. Which I’ve never tried because it too is now hydrogenated, at least the kind they sell in my local market.
Onion Tarts
September 6th, 2011
Last night, I made onion tarts, inspired by a 1911 recipe from Rufus Estes’s Good Things to Eat.
GLAZED ONIONS –Peel the onions and place in a saucepan with a little warmed butter, add sugar and salt to taste, pour over a little stock. Place over a moderate fire and cook slowly till quite tender and the outside brown. Remove and serve on a dish. A little of the liquor, thickened with flour, may be served as a sauce.
I chopped up a giant sweet vidalia onion, and tossed it into an heirloom cast-iron skillet, along with a chunk of melted butter, a couple teaspoons of sugar, and a dash of salt. I didn’t have any stock, so I just covered them with a little water.
Cooking over a “moderate” flame, it took a surprisingly long time for the onions to begin browning. But oh, when they did, what fragrance wafted through our garret! There wasn’t any liquor left over to make into sauce however. Perhaps I didn’t put in enough water/stock? But the onions themselves were definitely coated in a beautiful, sweet glaze.
I made a batch of tart shells to hold the onion filling (and a few extra for raspberry jam tarts) from a modern recipe. At the last minute, I tossed some grated Emmentaler into the bottom of the shell. The hot onions melted the cheese.
I forgot to take a picture of the finished tart until I’d already taken a bite. They were delicious. And the various bits kept well overnight too — I assembled another tart this evening and heated it in the oven for a few minutes. I’m in love.
Bananarama
August 3rd, 2011
This evening, I ventured forth from our garret in search of ice cream. It seems the type we wanted is no longer made, so I was forced to make a second choice. On a whim, I opted for chocolate covered frozen bananas instead.
An 1891 illustration of banana cultivation.
It wasn’t ice cream, but they were quite tasty and surprisingly refreshing. And they inspired me to look up this 1888 Good Housekeeping article extolling the virtues of this tropical fruit and encouraging housekeepers to introduce them to the family table.
BANANAS.
Of Large Food Value At Low Cost.
The banana has long been known as a tropical fruit in this country and counted among the luxuries of life, yet its more important use, that of a food, has received but little attention in modern times, though it was in common use for this purpose in the early part of the sixteenth century, and in tropical countries it takes the place of our cereals, forming a very important food. Its composition is about the same as the potato, and like that esculent it is an imperfect food by itself, but very valuable in combination with something more nitrogenous, such as lean meat or fish. Prof. Johnston says that in tropical America six and a half pounds of the fruit, or two pounds of the dry meal with a quarter of a pound of salt meat or fish form the daily allowance of a laborer. It is said to yield a larger supply of food than any other known vegetable, from a given amount of land, and according to Humboldt a space that would yield four hundred and sixty-two pounds of potatoes or thirty-eight pounds of wheat would produce four thousand pounds of bananas, which makes it a valuable crop to cultivate. After the tree bears one bunch of fruit it dies down and others spring up around it, but a single bunch weighs sometimes from seventy to eighty pounds, though the average quantity from a tree is but thirty to forty pounds. It is the bread of the tropics, for while unripe the fruit is filled with starch cells. In this state it is dried in the oven, when it tastes very much like bread and will keep a long time. When the fruit ripens the starch changes to sugar and it becomes sweet as we eat it. Some sages have thought the banana and not the apple caused Adam’s fall, poets even perpetuating it through ages, as for example, “Fruit like that Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve, Used by the tempter.”
A recent writer has said that “the banana, when ripened in the tropics, possesses the flavors of all other known fruits, and when fully ripe it fills the air with richest scents.” They have become a very important article of commerce, the imports of the banana having in a few years nearly trebled. Some years since a consignment of four thousand bunches was thought a large cargo, but now steamers are constructed to carry this fruit alone, and from eighteen to twenty thousand bunches is an ordinary load. Importing them in such quantities has tended to reduce their price and from selling at fifty cents to one dollar the dozen, they are now within the reach of the smallest purse and can be bought from twelve cents a dozen to twenty-five, the latter price being for large fine ones. As their cost is low, and their food value large, they should often appear on the table in various forms, so that we can increase the variety that gives zest to appetite, and yet makes the change that is so desirable to prevent one from feeling surfeited, from even too much of a good thing. They are good for breakfast or at dessert when they are ripe, in their natural state, or for a change in banana sponge, a salad, jelly, etc.
This post is dedicated to my dear friend K. E. M., aka Banana.
Top-Secret Tea
July 10th, 2011
Last Friday, I finally assembled all the ingredients for my new tea blend — which we plan to sell at the museum where I work, along with a booklet of mid-19th century tea lore that I compiled and edited earlier in the year. It’s based on a 19th-century tea blend found in one of the books I consulted while editing the little monograph.
I made a pot of the tea after Saturday’s dinner, and served it along with some left-over tart shells filled with cherry preserves. My goodness, it was delicious. It’s light, smooth, delicate, flavorful, and a bit sweet, all at once. Like very good first-flush Darjeeling, only not so ethereal. I tried it first plain, and then added milk. It was lovely both ways, and I think it would stand up just as well to lemon.
In fact, it was so incredibly good that I’ve decided to keep the blend a secret. You’ll just have to buy a packet (and a booklet) from the museum’s online gift shop — as soon as I’ve put it up for sale. Once it’s available, I’ll post the link. Until then, you can salivate. And (m)ooh and ahh over my adorable cow-shaped milk pitcher.
Lemon Dream
June 27th, 2011
It seems that Meyer lemons are in season right now in California. Well actually, these marvelous trees produce fruit throughout most of the year. If you’ve never run across a Meyer lemon before, they are a peculiarly sweet and juicy varietal introduced by a fellow named Meyer (naturally) in the early 20th century. They were very popular in Edwardian hothouses — in fact, my first introduction to a Meyer lemon was in the conservatory at Rockwood Mansion. We ran out of lemons while throwing a tea party, and were permitted to raid the gardener’s prize lemon tree.
The lemon tree shown here isn’t in a hothouse though — it’s in our friends’ California garden!
During our recent trip to the west coast of America, we enjoyed Meyer lemons with shameless abandon. And we smuggled a bag of them with us on the airplane.
I wanted to share a bit of their marvelous flavor with my friends at the New York Nineteenth Century Society, so I determined to make something out of them for our June meeting. After reviewing a number of receipts, some of which I still plan to try, I finally settled on lemon cream tarts.
The tart shells I made according to modern directions. But for the cream, I used a receipt originally published in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1854.
LEMON CREAM.—A large spoonful of brandy, six ounces of loaf-sugar powdered, the peel and juice of two lemons, the peel to be grated. Mix these ingredients well together in a bowl; then add a pint of cream, and whisk it up.
The theory is that the cream should curdle once it meets the lemon juice. But it didn’t really thicken as much as I was expecting. So I restored to whipping.
And the final result — shells lined with fresh New Jersey blueberries (’tis the season) and loaded with lemon cream. Delicious, if I do say so myself. And they were quite a hit at the meeting too!
