Italian Honey Tarts: They contain no honey and may not be Italian

I have no idea what makes this "Italian."

Italian Tarts with Italian Honey        Pastry: 8 oz (2 cups) flour 1 tsp salt (if butter is unsalted) 5 oz (10 tbsp) butter 1 tsp sugar ⅛ tsp lemon extract (or juice of 1 lemon) 1 egg yolk 2 tbsp ice-cold water (have at least half a cup on hand)        Italian Honey: 3 eggs 4 oz (½ cup) sugar 1 pinch (⅛ tsp) cream of tartar 2 oz (4 tbsp) butter 1 tsp salt (if butter is unsalted) 1 to 3 tsp lemon extract (depending on your taste) Have a 12-cup muffin pan ready. (Or use tartlet pans if you have them.) You probably don't need to coat it with cooking spray, but I did so I could be very sure nothing would get stuck. Sift flour and salt (if using) into a large bowl. Rub in the butter. Beat together the sugar, lemon extract (or lemon juice), egg yolk, and 2 tablespoons of water. Work this into the flour mixture. Mix until it forms a stiff dough, adding more water if it's too crumbly. Place in a sealed container (a ziploc bag will do) and let rest for at least 30 minutes in the refrigerator. Divide the dough into two portions. Roll half of it out. Cut it into small circles, then line the muffin cups with them. When rerolling the dough scraps, stack them on each other rather than smushing them into a ball-- this keeps the dough from getting tough. When you run out of dough, repeat with the other half of it. (If you have a large space to work with, you can roll all the dough out instead of dividing it in two. But you will have a very large and perhaps unwieldy sheet of it.) Refrigerate the tart shells for at least 30 minutes. (If you wrap the pan well, you can leave them in the fridge overnight or for a couple of days if desired). When ready to bake, make the Italian Honey: In the top of a double boiler (or a mixing bowl that can handle sitting over a pot of boiling water), whisk the eggs, sugar, and cream of tartar until thoroughly mixed. Add the butter and place over simmering water (simmering, not boiling hard), stirring constantly until the butter is melted and the mixture is about as thick as cake batter. Remove from heat and allow to cool. Heat oven to 350° (gas mark 4, 180°C). Bake the pastry shells until they are slightly golden. Then spoon in the filling almost to the top of each tart shell, being careful none of it spills down the sides. If you want to be very sure your tarts won't stick, let the empty pastry shells cool until they won't fall apart when you handle them. (You don't need to wait for them to get all the way to room temperature.) Then lift each one out, put it into a paper cupcake liner, and return it to the muffin pan. Then add the filling. Bake until the tarts puff up and are firm when you shake the pan. "In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; 8 July 1935; page 3

I saw the recipe for "Italian Tarts" and it looked like an empty pie crust. Then I noticed the recipe below is "Italian Honey." Apparently the staff at The Southern Districts Advocate assumed that readers would know that the Italian honey goes in the Italian tarts.

The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; 8 July 1935

I would love to know what makes this "Italian honey." Is this derived from an Italian honey substitute? I looked up "Italian honey" to see if people still make anything resembling this recipe (in Australia or anywhere else). But I only found people selling honey from Italy. I didn't even see anyone describing it as an "old, forgotten dish" like bloater paste.

Whatever "Italian honey" is, it starts off with eggs and a lot of butter. I almost thought it was a custard, but it seems closer to our chess pie.

I was going to put this directly on the stove burner because I rarely bother with double boilers these days. But then I realized this would turn into scrambled eggs given the slightest mistake. So I perched our bowl over a pot of water (simmering, not boiling!) as the recipe says.

The recipe says to cook "till thick," but I didn't know what that meant. Should our Italian honey be runny enough to pour? Should it be firm enough to hold a shape? I cooked it until you could swipe a finger across a coated spoon and leave a line, which brings us about into cake batter territory. Our honey would have made a very nice sauce, but I didn't see how this could ever be used in tarts. It would spill as soon as you lifted one off the plate.

I was going to dye it purple, but I added a few tasteful drops of yellow instead.

Upon tasting, our Italian honey reminded me again of chess pie (which as we said, is very similar in ingredients). I did not regret setting up a double boiler.

I was going to use our Italian honey as a sort of custard sauce in the trifle we saw recently. But then I realized I would never forgive myself for half-finishing a recipe. We therefore would complete our Italian tarts.

Unfortunately, we didn't have enough butter for the pastry, so I had to substitute half shortening. I've seen a lot of people swear that shortening makes the best pie crusts, that it handles ever-so-well, and that it is by far superior to every other option (as long as you don't care how the pie crust tastes). But every time I've tried to use shortening, my crusts have come out crumbly and hard to work with. They always crack no matter how gently I "ease" them into place.

By contrast, I can drape a butter crust into place almost as easily as laying out a dishrag. And butter is supposed to be harder to work with. As a visual reminder:

This is all butter, no shortening.

Let's compare that to just about every shortening crust I've ever made:

Getting back to the recipe, I'm not sure what the egg yolk is supposed to do in the pastry. I looked it up online and only found a lot of AI slop. A few actual humans made vague claims that the pie will be "richer." 

These were very irksome to get into place because of the shortening. They kept wanting to crack and crumble. But on the bright side, we learned that our largest pastry cutter (viz. an extra-large peach can with both ends cut off) from when we made freestanding lemon tarts is the perfect size for making pie shells in a muffin pan. I used to have to make lots of little pastry balls and roll them out one by one.

I filled two tarts before I realized that I was only inviting failure. I had forgotten to pop the little shells out of the pan and into into paper liners. That meant that if even the tiniest drop of Italian honey dripped out of place, it would glue our tarts to the pan. And once tarts get stuck, you can only get them out in pieces.

I had no idea how long to bake our Italian tarts, so I took them out of the oven after they stopped wobbling when I shook the pan. I didn't know what to think when they puffed up, though. Had I made some unholy sugar-laden bastardization of that "cloud bread" that made the rounds when keto was the big diet trend? (In case you missed it, "cloud bread" was basically an aerated version of those weird scrambled-egg sheets they use on Egg McMuffins.)

Our tarts deflated back into normal as they cooled. Nevertheless, I wasn't reassured until I cut one open and found that we did not have tart-sized pucks of scrambled egg.Instead, we had dessert.

The special Italian pie crust tasted very ordinary. If you're making your own pie dough, a few drops of lemon extract won't go amiss. But if you want to simply buy frozen tart shells, you won't miss it.

These have the same texture as Harris Teeter's lemon squares without the heavy payload of sugar. They're perfect for when you want something sweet but not too sweet. I'm still not sure why they're called Italian honey, but I did like them enough to make them again.