Home › Pastry and Puddings › Strawberry Tarts
Strawberry Tarts
For strawberry tarts the crust should be made into a puff paste. Then make a syrup of one pound of sugar and one teacupful of water; add a little white of an egg, put it into a kettle, let it boil, and skim it until only a foam arises; then put in a quart of berries, free from hulls and stems; let them boil until they look clear, and the syrup is quite thick. This, put into the puff paste, when warm, makes a most delicious tart for tea. This recipe is also good for tarts of other acid fruits.
VII. Fruit Short-Cake.
This is a stovetop strawberry preserve spooned into baked puff pastry shells rather than a fruit filling baked inside a crust. The syrup does the work, so the sugar boil is where the attention goes.
- Bake the shells blindThe filling is cooked separately and added warm, so the puff paste must be baked through on its own. Bake tart shells or vol-au-vent cases at 400F until fully coloured and dry inside, or the base will slump under the syrup.
- A teacupfulTeacup measures of this period varied; reckon it somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz. With a pound of sugar (a little over 2 cups) that gives a fairly heavy syrup from the start, which is what you want if the berries are to stay whole.
- The egg white is a clarifierA spoonful of raw white beaten into the cold syrup coagulates as it heats and drags scum to the surface, where it is skimmed off. It is a sugar-boiler's trick for a clear syrup and is not part of the finished tart; skim until only clean foam rises, then skim that too.
- A quart of berriesAbout 1 1/2 lb hulled, or roughly 700 g. Small, firm, slightly underripe fruit holds its shape; large modern supermarket strawberries collapse into jam long before they "look clear".
- Judging "clear" and "quite thick"The berries turn translucent when the syrup has penetrated them, usually 10 to 20 minutes at a steady simmer. For the syrup, 220-222F on a thermometer is the setting point; boiling much past that will candy the fruit hard as it cools.
- Fill warm, serve soonThe instruction to fill while warm is deliberate, but a syrup this wet softens pastry within the hour. Assemble at the table if you can.
- Other acid fruitsCurrants, gooseberries, sour cherries and rhubarb stalks all behave much the same way in a heavy syrup, which is presumably what the recipe means by 'other acid fruits'.
- YieldEnough filling for about eight individual tarts, or one large shell with fruit to spare.
Fruit "put up" in a heavy sugar syrup and then spooned into a pre-baked case was one way of making a fresh fruit tart before commercial pectin and reliable refrigeration; the sugar both preserved the fruit and gave it the gloss that a baked-in filling never achieves. The clarifying of syrup with egg white is older still, borrowed from confectioners and sugar refiners, and appears in English cookery books well before this one. The note that the tart is "delicious for tea" places it among the afternoon-tea habits in which a filled pastry stood alongside bread and butter and cake rather than closing a dinner.