Currant Jelly Tartlets

In modern recipe books it is rare that you will find instruction on how “To Clean Old Oil Paintings” under a pork recipe, but in the Household Book for Practical Receipts by Mrs. George W M Reynolds, that is exactly what you will find. Recipe #224 is for chocolate cream and recipe #225 is for “Dr. Birt Davies’ Gout Mixture.” Recipe #487 is to “Pickle Cheeks of Bacon” and #488 is for “Were’s Eye Lotion.” Recipe #871 is called “Lemon Cream for the Sun burn or Freckles” and #872 is for Currant Jelly Tartlets, which brings me to my next culinary adventure.

Today I will be making Currant Jelly Tartlets. The original recipe reads:

Put four tablespoonsfuls of the best currant jelly into a basin, and stir to it gradually twelve spoonfuls of beaten egg ; if the preserve be rich and sweet, no sugar will be required. Line some pans with paste rolled very thin, fill them with the custard, and bake them about ten minutes.

I found this recipe a bit tricky because lining “some pans” with “paste rolled very thin” meant pretty much nothing to me. Some pans? Cake pans? Brownie pans? Four tablespoons of currant jelly is not going to spread across an 8x10 pan. And what exactly is paste? With a little research I found that “paste” is really just piecrust. A simple sweet paste can be made from flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. All ingredients are mixed together to form a stiff paste, thus the name! The following recipe for paste is from “Soyer's Standard Cookery” (1912):

Sweet Paste For Tartlets

Ingredients. - Two pounds of fine flour, sixteen ounces of  castor sugar, ten ounces of butter, six eggs, the finely-grated rind of lemon.

Method. - Sift the flour into a bowl, make a hole in the center, put in the sugar, butter and eggs, and mix the whole into a stiff paste. Roll and use as required.

Now that we have more information, we can move on to the Currant Jelly Tartlets. For the tartlets, I decided to use a 6-cup cupcake pan. I cut rounds from the sweet paste using a martini glass to form perfect circles.

Then, I lined the cupcake pan with the cut-outs, pressing the middle of each round into the bottom of the pan.

Next, I mixed the beaten egg into the currant jelly.

Then, I poured the currant jelly mixture into the middle of the paste rounds.

I baked the tartlets in an oven at 350 F for ten minutes, like the recipe said, but they were not nearly done by that point so I watched them until the egg mixture became firm and then removed them from the oven.

The verdict: They aren't the most beautiful tartlets in the world, but they sure are tasty! (I might suggest a little of the currant jelly on top for some more flavor and sweetness.) If I were to make this again, I would use a smaller cup cupcake pan (possibly a 12 or 24 cup pan) which would spread the mixture more thinly and enable the custard to cook more quickly. 

Happy adventuring!