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Apple Tart, Plain
Line the edge of a tart-dish with good short crust, fill it with apples pared, cored, and quartered, and a little lemon-juice and sugar strewn over. A little water may be added if the apples are not juicy. Cover it with paste and bake in a good oven. Time to bake, nearly an hour. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, 1s.
A single-crust deep-dish tart of the English kind: fruit heaped in a pie dish, pastry over the top only, and a strip of pastry pressed round the rim to hold it. Almost everything unstated here is a quantity, so a few decisions are yours.
- "Line the edge"This is not a bottom crust. You cut a ribbon of pastry a little wider than the rim of the dish, damp the rim, press the ribbon on, then lay the lid over it and seal the two together. The ribbon is what stops the lid sliding into the fruit as it cooks.
- Tart-dishAn oval or round earthenware pie dish about 8-9 inches across and 2 inches deep, with a broad flat rim. A modern deep pie plate or shallow baking dish of about 1.5 quarts works, so long as it has enough lip to take the pastry band.
- "A good oven"A fairly brisk one, though the book gives no temperature and no scale. As a modern approximation, start around 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and lift the crust, then drop to about 350F for the remaining time; an hour at a steady 425F would darken the pastry long before the apples softened.
- Sugar and lemon are undefinedFor roughly 2 lb of prepared apples, 3 to 4 oz (about half a cup) of sugar and the juice of half a lemon would not be out of keeping. Cooking apples of the Bramley type collapse to a puree; firmer apples hold their quarters.
- WaterTwo tablespoons is plenty, and only if the apples are dry or late in the season. Any more and the juices boil up under the lid and soften the pastry from beneath.
- Heap the fruitFill the dish above the rim so the apples support the lid as they shrink. An upturned pie funnel or a small ovenproof cup in the centre does the same job; funnels are usually said to support the lid and let steam escape.
- Vent the crustCut two or three slits in the lid before baking. Sealed shut, the steam lifts the pastry off the filling and leaves a hollow dome.
- Time and yieldNearly an hour is right for a full deep dish of raw apple; test with a skewer through a slit rather than by the colour of the crust. Serves five or six, traditionally with cream, custard or a wedge of cheese.
- "Probable cost, 1s."One shilling, twelve old pence. Costings of this kind run through the book, which was sold as a household manual as much as a recipe collection.
Cassell's calls this one "plain" to distinguish it from richer apple tarts made with puff paste, glazed with egg and sugar, or flavoured with quince, cloves or marmalade. Apples were an obvious choice, since they stored through the winter in ordinary cellars when little else did. The suggestion of cheese alongside apple tart is long-standing in the north of England and is often said to be older than the printed recipes that mention it.