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Angelica Tart
Pare and core some golden pippins; then take an equal quantity of the stalks of angelica, peel them, and cut them into small pieces. Boil the apples in water enough to cover them, with lemon peel and fine sugar. Do them gently, till they produce a thin syrup, and then strain it off. Put it on the fire, together with the angelica, and let both boil ten minutes. Make a puffpaste, lay it at the bottom of the tin, then a layer of apple and one of angelica, till full. Pour in the syrup, put on the cover, and bake moderately. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A two-crust apple tart in which angelica stalks stand in for half the fruit. The angelica is the whole point, and it is the one ingredient you cannot buy at a supermarket.
- Angelica means the fresh stalkThis calls for the young spring leaf-stalks of Angelica archangelica, peeled of their stringy outer skin. Older summer stalks are hollow, woody and bitter and will not soften. Candied angelica, sold for cake decoration, is the closest widely available substitute, but it is already sugar-saturated: use a quarter of the weight and leave it out of the boiling stage.
- If you gather it, be certainAngelica grows alongside several umbellifers that are seriously poisonous, including hemlock water-dropwort and poison hemlock, and the stalks look broadly similar. Do not use foraged stalks unless the plant has been identified with certainty by someone competent to do it.
- Golden pippinsA small, sharp, aromatic English dessert apple, now a collector's variety. Any firm acid apple that holds its shape works: Granny Smith or Braeburn. (Bramley is acid but cooks down to a puree, so it will not hold its shape here.) You want roughly equal weights of prepared apple and prepared angelica.
- "Fine sugar"Refined white sugar, as opposed to the coarser unrefined sugars also on sale. Ordinary granulated is the equivalent. Start with about 4 oz per pound of apple and adjust; the syrup should be sweet enough to balance angelica's musky bitterness.
- The syrup is the hingeThe apples are cooked only until they give up "a thin syrup," which is then strained off and used to boil the angelica for ten minutes. Do not let the apples collapse at this stage; they finish cooking in the tart. If the strained syrup is very thin, reduce it before it goes into the pastry or the bottom crust will be sodden.
- "Bake moderately"A moderate Victorian oven is usually rendered as roughly 350F, though the term was never precise. Puff paste needs more heat than that to lift, so start at 425F for 15 minutes to set and raise the crust, then drop to 350F for a further 25 to 35 minutes until the syrup bubbles at the vent.
- "The tin"A shallow metal pie or tart tin, not a deep dish. Lining the base with puff paste guarantees a soft bottom layer; blind-baking the base briefly, or using shortcrust below and puff above, gives a better result.
- Yield and costAn eight- or nine-inch tin serves six to eight. The "probable cost, 2s. 6d." is the costing note printed with these recipes for household budgeting.
Angelica was one of the great kitchen-garden herbs of northern Europe, valued as much for its supposed medicinal virtue as its flavour; the name and the epithet archangelica are traditionally linked to a belief that the plant was revealed by an archangel as a protection against plague, and it appears in monastic and apothecary gardens long before it appears in tarts. Its culinary career in Britain and France was largely as a candied sweetmeat, the stalks boiled in syrup until translucent green, a trade for which the town of Niort in western France became particularly known. By the time Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was compiled in the 1870s, angelica had slipped from a garden staple to a decorative confection, and a recipe that treats it as bulk fruit alongside apples reads as a survival from an earlier and more herb-minded kind of pastry-making. The golden pippin it is paired with was already declining then too, a small sharp apple prized through the eighteenth century and now grown mainly by orchard preservationists.