Home › December › Cranberry Tarts
Cranberry Tarts
Roll Rich Paste one-eighth inch thick; cut in three-inch squares. Put one or two teaspoons Cranberry mixture on one side of square, moisten the edges with water, fold in triangle shape. Crimp the edges and prick over top with fork. Bake same as pies. Sprinkle with fine sugar. Serve hot with cheese.
These are baked cranberry turnovers, and the recipe assumes you have already made two other things from earlier in the book: a rich (short) pastry and a cooked, sweetened cranberry filling. A few notes on filling in the gaps.
- Rich PasteThe book's "rich paste" is a short crust with a high proportion of butter or lard to flour, bound with ice water; the exact proportions are given in its own entry elsewhere in the book. Any all-butter pie dough will stand in; roll it a scant 1/8 inch so the pastry cooks through before the edges scorch.
- Cranberry mixtureBerries cooked with sugar until they burst and the mass mounds on a spoon — thicker than sauce, closer to a stiff jam. A loose filling will boil out of the seam. Cool it completely before it goes near the pastry.
- "Bake same as pies"The book gives no temperature; in modern terms a hot oven, around 425F, until the pastry is set and coloured, roughly 20 to 25 minutes for pieces this small. Turnovers do not need the long, reduced bake a deep fruit pie gets.
- SealingWater alone is a weak glue on a fat-rich dough. Press the folded edge firmly before crimping with a fork, and chill the assembled triangles for 15 minutes so the butter is cold going into the oven.
- Fork pricksThese are steam vents, not decoration. Cranberry filling generates a lot of steam and an unvented turnover will split at the seam.
- Fine sugarCaster sugar, or granulated pulsed briefly in a grinder. It is sprinkled on hot from the oven so it clings.
- YieldPastry made with 2 cups of flour gives roughly a dozen three-inch turnovers; at one or two teaspoons each that is only about a quarter to a half cup of filling.
- Serve hot with cheeseLess a garnish than the second half of the course. The recipe does not say which cheese; a wedge of firm aged cheddar suits, the salt and fat cutting the sharp cranberry.
Fruit pie eaten with cheese is an English habit, carried into American cookery and still surviving in the northern states and parts of Canada as apple pie with cheddar; here the author applies it to cranberry, a native North American berry of the late-autumn and winter season. 52 Sunday Dinners was built as a year of complete meal plans, which is why the instructions are so telegraphic — the pastry and the cranberry filling are given their own entries elsewhere in the book and the cook is expected to turn back to them. Cranberries kept well through the winter months, often stored in water in a cold cellar.