This time, Mrs. E's table setting does include vegetables, but there is the same strange admixture of sweet and savory dishes. Sweetmeat is fruit pulp with sugar, such as is used at Christmas to make fruit mince pies. It also includes candied stems, such as angelica. Not good for the diet!
William Verrall's puffs are made with conserve of cherries, but while he sounds strict about this, a colonial wife like Maria could have used any sweetmeat on hand.
CHERRIES IN A FRENCH PASTE
Des bignets de cerises au four
For this you must have a conserve of cherries, and your paste make as follows: take half a pint of water, put to it a morsel of fine sugar, a grain of salt and a bit of lemon-peel, an ounce of butter, and boil it a minute or two, take it from your fire, and work in as much fine flour as it takes to a tender paste, put one egg at a time and mould it well till it comes to such a consistence as to pour with the help of a spoon out of the stewpan upon a tin or cover, covered with flour; scrape it off in lumps upon tin with the handle of a large key, and bake them of a nice colour and crispness, cut a hole in the bottom, and fill up with your conserve, sift some sugar over, and dish up.
If you make this paste according to the rule before you, it will swell very large and hollow, and make a genteel entremets.
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