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Apricot Tart, Green
Take as many green apricots as may be required for the dish; put them into a saucepan with a little water, to keep them from burning, and half their weight in sugar. When they are soft through, put them, with the syrup, into a pie-dish which has been lined at the edges with good puff paste. Pile them high in the middle, cover, and bake in a good oven. The dish will be much improved in appearance if it is iced before sending to the table. To do this, beat the whites of eggs to a stiff froth, lay on the tart, and shake sifted loaf sugar over it; then put it into a moderate oven for five minutes to set. It must not be allowed to colour. When apricots cannot be obtained, young apples taken from the tree before the cores are formed are an excellent substitute. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A rim-crust fruit tart of the kind that assumes a kitchen garden out the back door, finished with a soft meringue. Two things need translating: what "green apricots" actually are, and how little heat the topping wants.
- Green apricotsThese are unripe fruit thinned from the tree in early summer, firm, sour and with a soft undeveloped kernel. They are almost never sold commercially; a farmers' market or a garden tree is the only realistic source. The recipe's own substitute — very young apples picked before the cores set — is the practical route, and hard underripe plums or greengages behave similarly.
- Half their weight in sugarThat ratio is calibrated to fruit that is genuinely mouth-puckering. If you are working with anything approaching ripe apricots or ordinary cooking apples, start at a quarter of the fruit's weight and taste the syrup before it goes into the dish.
- Lined at the edgesThe pastry is a rim only, laid around the lip of the pie-dish, with a lid over the top — there is no base crust. This is the standard English pie construction of the period and it is why the wet fruit and syrup do not ruin the pastry.
- A good ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 400-425F for the half-hour bake, hot enough to lift puff paste. A "moderate oven" is usually equated with about 350F, but the instruction that it must not colour means you want the lower end of that or below, nearer 300F, and five minutes is genuinely all it needs.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar came as a hard cone or block that was nipped and crushed at home; "sifted" means passed through a sieve to a fine powder. Caster sugar is a reasonable modern stand-in for dusting the meringue, though the sifted original may have been finer still.
- The meringue is barely cookedFive minutes at low heat sets the surface and little more. It is a soft meringue by design, but that means the whites do not reach a pasteurising temperature — worth knowing if serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, for whom pasteurised whites are the sensible swap.
- Cooling before the toppingPile the fruit high, as directed — it slumps as it bakes. Let the tart lose its fiercest heat before the meringue goes on, or the froth slides off the dome.
- Yield and costFour to five servings, as stated, at a probable cost of 1s 3d in Victorian money.
Cassell's belongs to the era of the walled kitchen garden, and this recipe exists because of a piece of routine horticulture: apricot trees set far more fruit than they can ripen, so gardeners thinned the crop hard in early summer and the discards came indoors by the basketful. Green apricots were too sour to eat out of hand but high in pectin and perfectly good stewed with sugar, and English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward are full of ways to use them — tarts, preserves, and pickling. The airy sugared topping the book calls "icing" is what we would now call a meringue; the older sense of icing covered any white sugar coating, and the instruction that it must not colour marks the boundary between this soft finish and a properly dried meringue. That the recipe offers immature apples as an alternative says a good deal about the priority: the point was the sharp, firm, half-formed fruit, not the apricot in particular.