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Cranberry Tart
Wash the cranberries in several waters. Allow a quarter of a pound of sugar and two cloves to every pint of cranberries, and partially cook them before putting them into the tart. Three-parts fill a pie-dish with the fruit, cover it with a good crust, and bake in a moderate oven. Before baking the tart, brush it all over with cold water, and sprinkle white sugar upon it. A pint of cranberries will make a tart sufficient for three persons.
A straightforward covered fruit pie, but cranberries are far more acidic and far less juicy than the apples this method was built for, and the sugar here is on the lean side for modern palates.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature or time. By later convention read it as roughly 350F (180C), and bake until the top is set and lightly coloured and juice bubbles at the edge.
- A pint of cranberriesAn imperial pint of whole berries is roughly 14-15 oz / 400g, a little more than a standard 12 oz supermarket bag. The quarter-pound of sugar per pint is about half a cup, which will taste sharp to modern palates; some cooks will want more.
- Partially cook themThis is the instruction that decides the pie. Warm the berries with the sugar, cloves and a spoonful or two of water only until the skins begin to split, then stop. Fully cooked berries collapse to sauce and soak the crust; raw ones burst in the oven and flood it.
- Pie-dish and crustA deep dish with a rim, filled three-quarters, so the fruit does not touch the pastry lid and steam has somewhere to go. "A good crust" here most likely means a short crust or a plain puff paste, not a bottom-and-top American double crust — this is a covered pie-dish, pastry on top only.
- The water-and-sugar glazeBrushing with cold water rather than egg and dusting with caster or granulated sugar gives a matte, frosted, crackling top. Use fine sugar; coarse crystals sit on the surface and scorch.
- ClovesTwo whole cloves per pint is assertive. Fish them out before filling the dish if you would rather not have a guest bite one, or substitute a strip of orange zest, which suits cranberries just as well.
- Yield and servingThree portions as written, from a small dish — realistically four modest ones. Serve warm rather than hot, with cream or a plain custard to soften the acidity.
The wild European cranberry, Vaccinium oxycoccos, grows in northern bogs and was long gathered in Britain and Scandinavia, but by the late nineteenth century the larger American species was also reaching British kitchens, sold through the winter — cranberries keep remarkably well, which is why they turn up in Christmas and New Year cookery when little other fresh fruit does. The name is generally traced to a Low German or Dutch form meaning crane-berry, said to refer to the shape of the flower's drooping stamen and style.