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Apple Tart, Rich
Line a tart-dish with puff paste. Rub the apples well before paring them, then put the skins and cores into a saucepan, with the rind and juice of a lemon, one clove, some fine sugar, and enough water to cover them. While they are simmering, fill the dish with apples sliced. Pour the strained liquid over the apples, cover with the puff paste, and bake. Serve with cream or good custard. Time to bake, nearly an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward covered apple tart whose one clever step is easy to overlook: the peelings and cores are simmered into a flavoured, lightly pectinous syrup that goes back into the pie.
- The hingeStrain the peel-and-core liquid and reduce it before it goes over the fruit. Poured in thin and watery it will boil up through the lid and leave the paste soggy; you want a few tablespoons of syrup, not a cupful.
- Oven heatThe original gives no oven instruction at all, only "nearly an hour". Puff paste generally wants a hot start, so a modern reading would be about 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and lift the pastry, then 350F for the remaining 40 minutes or so, which comes to roughly the hour the recipe allows.
- Lining with puff pasteCassell's calls for puff paste both under and over. A bottom crust of puff tends to be softer than shortcrust under a wet filling; blind-bake the lined dish 10 minutes with a weight if you want any crispness beneath, or line with shortcrust and cap with puff.
- Tart-dishA Victorian tart-dish was typically a shallow oval or round pie dish with a wide rim for the pastry to grip, often around 8-9 inches. A modern deep pie plate works; a loose-bottomed tart tin does not, as the syrup will leak.
- ApplesUse a firm cooking apple that holds shape and gives up pectin - Bramley, Granny Smith, or a mix of tart and sweet. About 2 lb prepared fruit fills a 9-inch dish once sliced and mounded.
- Sugar"Some fine sugar" is unquantified: fine (caster) sugar goes into the peel liquid, and how much depends on the apples. Start with 3-4 oz for 2 lb of fruit and taste the syrup before straining.
- Rubbing the applesThe recipe does not say why the fruit is rubbed before paring, but the skins go into the syrup pan, so cleaning them is the obvious reason. Wash the apples well on the same logic - the skins are an ingredient here.
- Cost and yieldThe original gives the cost as 1s. 4d. and the yield as five or six persons. 'Good custard' is unspecified; a pouring custard rather than a set one is the likelier reading.
Cassell's places this among its "rich" versions of ordinary dishes - the same fruit as a plain apple pie, but bound with puff paste and a syrup drawn from the trimmings. That syrup is the frugal heart of a wealthy-looking recipe: apple skins and cores carry most of the fruit's pectin and a good deal of its aroma, so simmering them with lemon and a clove produced both flavour and body at no extra cost, in an era when commercial pectin did not yet exist in British kitchens. Covered apple tarts of this kind are attested in English cookery well before the seventeenth century, and the pairing with cream or a pouring custard was so standard by the 1870s that Cassell's dispatches it in a single short phrase and assumes the reader knows the rest.