Meringue Tarts: Not the pleasant change I hoped they'd be

Have you had too much lemon pie lately?

Lemon or Butterscotch Meringue Tarts Have lemon meringue or butterscotch pie filling ready to go. Use the recipe of your choice and cut it in half. (Your recipe may simply be "purchase one can/box of pie filling.") If you make it yourself, be sure it is completely cooled off. (Try my great-grandmother's butterscotch pie filling! Just cook it in a saucepan until thick enough to almost hold a shape when spooned.) Make one double-crust pie's worth of dough. After rolling it out, have a three- and four-inch cookie cutter ready. For each tart, cut out three 4-inch circles out of the rolled-out dough. Then use the three-inch cutter to cut out the centers of two of them. Brush or finger-paint the top of the intact circle with water. Then stack the pastry rings on top of it. Brush each layer with water before putting the next one on top. Be sure the rings are nicely aligned as you stack them, otherwise they will slump sideways in the oven. When rerolling the dough scraps, stack them on each other instead of wadding them up into a ball. This helps keep the dough from becoming tough. When ready to bake, heat oven to 425°. Line a baking sheet with foil. Bake the cases until delicately browned, about 10-15 minutes. Then allow to cool. While they are cooling, reduce the oven to 350°. Then fill them with the (cooled!) pie filling. If desired, top with a meringue and bake until golden on top. (Or just spoon in the pie filling, forget the meringue, and call it a day.) You can also fill these with ice cream topped with fresh berries, or custard, or anything else you like. Undated Chicago Tribune newspaper clipping, probably 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

This is one of my great-grandmother's newspaper clippings. Check out the caption under the photo: "A tart is a pleasant change from a piece of lemon meringue pie, but contains the same ingredients." I love the idea of a world where we have so much lemon pie that we need "a pleasant change" from it. 

I pretended that my life had too much lemon in it and waited until the temperature got cold enough to justify running the oven to 425°. Then I cracked open my great-grandmother's notebook to this:  

Before I could make these, I had to come up with three-inch and four-inch cookie cutters. I briefly thought about buying them, but then I saw the prices. And while I have a habit of ill-advised kitchen splurges, I didn't want to sink money into today's tarts. Besides, if I never made them again, the four-inch cutter would sit in the drawer and remind me that I wasted $10.

The three-inch cutter was easy enough: cut the top and bottom off a can of peaches, and announce that we're having "peach salad" with dinner tonight. (read: canned peaches suspended in red Jello.) But I didn't have any four-inch diameter cans lying around the house.

I took a ruler to every cup and bowl, but none of them were the right size. Then I realized that if I cut one of the old cottage cheese tubs (of course we save sour cream and cottage cheese tubs) short enough, it would be four inches across. I only note this so I can say how much I love my kitchen scissors. I thought I'd have to put a lot of force into this, but these scissors made it as easy as cutting up construction paper.

If it's three inches across at the top and five inches across at the bottom, then it must be four inches across at some point.

Of course, I could have saved a lot of time by bringing a pocket ruler the next time I went grocery shopping. But by borrowing a pack of 4"x6" cards from the office supplies aisle, I found that extra-large fruit cans are four inches across. I then told myself "Everyone at the house really wanted a lot of peach 'salad' anyway." So now, for the first time in my life, I own a matching set of nested cookie cutters!

The little tomato paste can has been in regular use for a while now.

After making our perfect pie dough (that's the heading on the page, and you don't argue with someone who has perfect Palmer handwriting), I decided to let it rest. I know the article doesn't mention that, but Delia Smith does. And look what a difference a half-hour's relaxation made! It rolled out with no cracks, no crumbly bits, no problems at all.

For comparison, here is what happened when we made dough from the same recipe and didn't give it a moment's rest before flattening it:

Our success soon got a lot more tedious. You don't get many four-inch circles out of a single sheet of pie dough. We would have to reroll this a lot.

When we cut out the center holes, the remaining rings were thinner than I expected.

As we learned in our old newspaper articles, you can reroll pie scraps as many times as you want if you fold and stack them. (I'm sure there's a limit, but...) This scrap pile might look like I wadded them, but I did try to lay them in horizontal layers. And of course, I didn't squeeze or press them into shape. After all, we were expressly told that "kneading or squeezing the pastry forms it into a sticky mass."

It was kind of amusing to see those three-inch circles stretch as I persuaded the dough back into a flat sheet. And credit to the newspaper article I learned this from, the dough didn't break apart at all.

Also I'm pretty sure I should have rested the dough every now and then between rerollings. Because of my impatience, I had to use a LOT of force on the rolling pin by the time we got to assembling the last tart or two. But had I let the dough rest for half an hour every other time, this would have taken all night. I decided that no one would have turned tartlets into an all-day affair unless they worked in a bakery. 

Even without letting the dough rest before restretching it, these took long enough. I only got one tart's worth of four-inch circles out of the dough every time I rerolled it. If I hadn't made the pie filling the night before, I wouldn't have baked these tonight. 

Moving away from the rolling pin, it turns out there's a bit of a knack to assembling these. The newspaper article made it seem as easy as stacking crackers, but it was more like trying to neatly arrange rubber bands.

Our tart shells puffed up a lot in the oven. You can really see the multilayered effect of stacking the scraps instead of kneading and smushing them into one big dough ball. They did look a little underbaked, but I figured they're supposed to go into the oven twice.

As we learned, these slump sideways unless you stack your dough rings perfectly on top of each other. I reached in the oven and tried to nudge the worst ones back into shape. It didn't work.

But if you do this right, this is what you get.

Looks like something from a beginners pottery class, doesn't it?

 It was finally time to get some pie into these. The Chicago Tribune's cooking staff piped the meringue on top, so I did the same. Squirting the meringue into place also seemed a lot easier than trying to spread it across semi-gelatinous pie filling. And while I did manage to extrude the meringue semi-evenly across the pie, I did have to go back with a spoon and fix it.

Ahhh, that's better.

One of these is empty because I was going to follow the article and try it with ice cream.

The first tarts we had made exuded a lot of melted butter as they baked again. I'm not sure if puff-paste just does that, or if I was a bit too good at cutting the butter in "coarsely."

If you really like pie crust, this is definitely for you. You end up chewing on a big wad of dough. Like, they got cooked all the way through but they really didn't seem like it. They almost reminded me of medieval trenchers (ie, plates made out of hard-baked flour paste) because they were technically edible, but seemed like you should eat the food on top and then throw them out.

If you're going to serve a big wad of pie crust, it needs to taste like something. This was only bland baked dough. Nevertheless, the idea has potential. I might revisit it with cookie dough, or perhaps make herbed biscuit dough and put something like tuna salad in them. Or, cut out circles of pie crust and then use strips of puff-paste to make the rims.

I guess today's recipe can make a pie easy to serve if people can't take a plate and sit down, but otherwise this is too much work for too much disappointment. And I am rarely disappointed with pie.  

More gallingly, didn't work with the lemon meringue pie recipe even though they literally tell me to make meringue tarts in the headline. We used half a pie's worth of filling, a whole pie's worth of meringue, and two pies' worth of dough.

On a positive note, these things were sturdy. You usually can't stack pies on each other.

I also can't say I liked the size of these tarts. They're too big to serve one, but not quite big enough to serve two. Obviously, you can easily fix that by changing what size circles you cut out. But you still have a lot of pie crust on the sides of this. If you want a freestanding pie, this is definitely a good way to go about it (where was this newspaper clipping when we did a piecaken?). I might use this method if I want to make edible serving bowls, but I'll do my future small tarts by pressing pie dough into a muffin pan.