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Cherry Tart
Line the edges of a deep pie-dish with a good short crust. Fill it with cherries, picked and washed, put a cup or small jelly pot in the middle of the dish, strew a little sugar over, and a few red currants, if they can be got, as they will considerably improve the flavour of the tart. Cover the dish with a crust, and ornament the edges. Brush the tart all over with cold water, and sprinkle white sugar upon it. Bake in a good oven. Time to bake, thirty to forty minutes. Probable cost of a medium-sized tart, 10d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
An English deep-dish fruit tart rather than an American pie: the pastry sits only on the rim and the lid, with no base. A few points of the method need translating.
- The cup in the middleAn inverted teacup or small jelly pot props up the centre of the lid so it does not sag into the fruit, and it collects juice as the cherries cook down. A pie funnel or a small ovenproof ramekin does the same job; leave it in place when serving and lift it out as you cut.
- "Line the edges"Only the rim of the dish is pastry-lined, with a strip pressed onto the moistened lip to give the lid something to seal against. There is no bottom crust, so use a dish deep enough that the fruit does not touch the lid.
- A good ovenFor a modern oven, somewhere around 400-425F is a reasonable equivalent, hot enough to set and brown the short crust in the stated thirty to forty minutes; much cooler and the underside of the lid steams rather than bakes.
- Sugar quantityThe recipe says only 'a little sugar,' with more sprinkled over the lid, and leaves the amount to the cook. As a modern starting point, for about 2 lb of fruit try 1/3 to 3/4 cup depending on variety, plus more with sour cherries such as morello.
- StonesThe recipe says only that the cherries are picked and washed, and does not mention stoning them. Pit the fruit unless you want to warn everyone at the table; expect noticeably more juice once they are stoned.
- Red currantsNot decoration. They add acid and pectin, which sharpens the flavour and slightly thickens the juice. Frozen currants work; a tablespoon of lemon juice is the nearest substitute if none are available.
- The water-and-sugar glazeBrushing with cold water and dusting with caster or granulated sugar gives a crisp, frosted finish rather than the gloss of an egg wash. Do it just before the tart goes in, or the sugar dissolves.
- JuiceNothing is added to thicken, so the filling stays loose and soupy under the lid, as intended. Cut a small vent in the crust and stand the dish on a tray to catch any boil-over.
- Yield and costFive or six servings. The 10d. is the book's estimate of what the ingredients would cost, and is of interest only as a period detail.
Cassell's places this among its plain fruit tarts, the ordinary summer sweet of an English household between June and July, when cherries and red currants overlapped in the market and the garden. The deep-dish form with pastry on top only is the older British pattern, distinct from the double-crust American pie: it needs less flour, bakes faster, and keeps the fruit's juice as juice rather than trying to set it. The propping cup is a purely practical fixture of that construction, and the purpose-made ceramic pie funnel, often moulded as a blackbird, is generally said to have been sold for the same job in later years. The encouragement to add red currants reflects a cook's understanding, arrived at by taste rather than by chemistry, that a sweet fruit tart wants acid behind it.