Make a rich biscuit dough; roll out; then put on a well-buttered baking-tin. Stone black cherries. Sprinkle the dough with flour and cover with the cherries. Sprinkle with sugar and let bake until done. Then cover with a sweetened egg custard and bake until brown. Serve cold.
July 26 — No. 26
Viennese
A sketch rather than a formula: the book gives no quantities, no tin size and no temperature, so the cook is expected to supply a pastry base she already knows. Two things decide whether it works — the flour barrier under the fruit, and not overbaking the custard.
- "Rich biscuit dough"Genuinely ambiguous. In an English-language book of this kind "biscuit dough" would usually mean a rich baking-powder biscuit or shortcake dough; in a Viennese context Biskuit means sponge; and a dough that is rolled out and laid in a tin could equally be a sweet short pastry (Mürbteig). Rolling it out about 1/4 inch thick is a safe reading, but the book does not say which is meant.
- The flour sprinkleThis is the hinge. The dusting of flour between pastry and fruit absorbs cherry juice as it runs and keeps the base from going to paste. Ground almonds, semolina or fine breadcrumbs do the same job and taste better.
- Cherries"Black cherries" is ambiguous: it may mean dark sweet cherries (German Schwarzkirschen), though Central European cherry baking makes heavy use of sour cherries too (Morello/Schattenmorellen, Austrian Weichseln). With sweet cherries reduce the sugar sprinkle; drain jarred sour cherries thoroughly.
- OvenBake the pastry-and-fruit stage at 375–400F until the crust is set and coloured at the edges, then lower to about 325F once the custard goes on. Custard poured onto a hot base at high heat will curdle and weep.
- The custardA sweetened egg custard here means eggs, sugar and milk or cream — roughly 2 eggs to a cup of dairy for a slice that holds. It is done when the centre barely trembles, around 170–175F; "bake until brown" will overshoot unless you finish briefly under a hot grill.
- Tin and yieldA plain flat baking-tin will let the custard escape, so use one with sides; a rimmed quarter-sheet or a 9x13 tin would suit. No quantities are given, so the yield cannot be fixed from the recipe — a tin that size, cut into squares, would give roughly a dozen pieces.
- Serving coldThe instruction is not incidental. The custard sets fully as it cools and the fruit juices thicken; cut warm, it collapses. Chill at least two hours.
Cherry pastries of this kind are everyday baking across the old Habsburg lands, known generally as Kirschkuchen or, in the Czech and Austrian countryside, as a fruit Blechkuchen — literally sheet-tin cake, the format that made a large tray of fruit go a long way. The sour cherry is often said to be a characteristic Central European baking fruit, and the late-July date this recipe is given falls at the tail of its short season. Pouring custard over the fruit partway through baking is a habit sometimes associated with German Rahmkuchen and Alsatian cherry tarts, and it solves a practical problem: it binds juice that would otherwise flood the pastry. The book belongs to the once-popular genre of one-dish-a-day, one-nation-a-day calendars, which condensed foreign recipes to a few lines and assumed the reader had a pastry recipe of her own; the vagueness here is the format, not carelessness.