Ingredients: A grated pine-apple and its weight in sugar, half its weight in butter, five eggs (the whites beaten to a stiff froth), one cupful of cream.
Cream the butter, and beat it with the sugar and yolks until very light; add the cream, the pine-apple, and the whites of the eggs. Bake with an under crust. To be eaten cold.
Chess-pie.
A gentleman friend spoke to me so often about a wonderfully delicious pie that a lady friend in the country made, that it is not surprising that a person of my culinary tastes should have been very curious. “I will send for the receipt,” said I. “But that will not benefit you,” he replied, “for I have given the receipt to several of my friends, and they never succeed. Instead of the light production three or four inches high of my country friend, the others are heavy, waxy affairs, very different.” I actually took a little journey to see the lady, to get any side explanations from her own lips. I was repaid, as you will see by trying the pie.
Ingredients: For two pies, five eggs, three quarters of a cupful of butter, one cupful of sugar, and necessary flavoring.
Beat the yolks and sugar together until they are a perfect froth. Beat the butter until it is a creamy froth also. Now quickly add them together, flavoring with a little extract of vanilla. Bake it in a crust: it will rise very light. As soon as done, have ready the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth, sweetened with a little sugar, and flavored with a few drops of the extract. Spread this over the tops of the pies, which return to the oven, to receive a delicate coloring.
The lady says the secret of the pies not becoming heavy is in cutting them, and distributing them on the plates, as soon as they are cooked, and still hot; that if they are allowed to cool without cutting them, they will fall. This is rather strange; nevertheless, it seems to be true.
Small Vols-au-vent, or Patty-cases.
Make puff paste as before described; give it six or seven turns, wetting the top of the paste, before turning it the last time, with water or a little lemon-juice; roll it out evenly about a third of an inch thick. Cut out as many cakes as are required with a circular tin cutter (a scolloped one is prettier) about two inches in diameter. Now take a second cutter about half an inch smaller in diameter than the first, and press it into the tops of the patties, allowing it to sink half-way through the crust; or cut the patties with a sharp penknife, tracing it around a little paste-board model.
