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Currant and Raspberry Tart
The addition of a few raspberries very greatly improves the flavour of a red currant tart, but they must be carefully looked over to see that there are no little worms inside the berries after they are picked. Strip the currants from the stalks, and allow three heaped table-spoonfuls of moist sugar to every quart of fruit. Line the edges of a deep pie-dish with good crust (see CRUST FOR FRUIT TARTS). Place an inverted cup in the middle of the dish. Fill the latter with the fruit, and cover it with the same crust as the edges. Ornament the top as fancy dictates, and bake in a good oven. Sift a little pounded sugar over the tart before serving it. Time to bake, half an hour or more, according to the size of the dish. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plate-less English fruit pie: pastry only round the rim and over the top, with the juice left to pool in the dish. A few conversions and one structural point are all it needs.
- No bottom crustThe pastry lines only the edges of the dish and forms the lid. This is the classic deep-dish fruit pie, not a tart in the modern sense; the fruit sits directly in the dish and makes its own syrup.
- The inverted cupAn eggcup or small teacup placed upside down in the centre helps support the pastry lid as the fruit collapses; a ceramic pie funnel is the later equivalent. Without one the lid is more likely to sink into the juice.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperatures; for a pastry-lidded fruit pie something in the region of 400F (200C) is a reasonable reading, the pastry wanting early heat to set before the fruit floods it. Half an hour suits a small dish; a large deep one may want 40-45 minutes, covered loosely with foil if the top colours too fast.
- Moist sugarSoft light brown sugar. Three heaped tablespoons to a quart of fruit is about 60-75 g, which is restrained by modern standards for red currants; taste the fruit and add more if it is very sharp.
- A quart of fruitMeasured by volume, not weight: roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb (550-700 g) of stripped currants and raspberries together. The recipe asks only for "a few" raspberries, so redcurrants should dominate.
- Pounded sugarSugar broken from a loaf and crushed fine in a mortar. Use caster or superfine sugar, dusted over while the tart is still warm so it clings.
- Stripping currantsRun the stalks through the tines of a fork over a bowl.
- The raspberry warningThe "little worms" are raspberry beetle larvae, still common on unsprayed fruit. A ten-minute soak in lightly salted water floats them out; drain and dry the berries well before use.
- YieldFour to five as written; the recipe does not give a dish size. The "probable cost, 1s." is a Victorian household budgeting note, not an instruction.
Cassell's belongs to the era when a deep pie-dish and a rim of pastry were a common English treatment for summer fruit, and redcurrant with raspberry was among the familiar pairings. The two ripen together in a British garden in July, and the combination has a practical logic as well as a traditional one: redcurrants are high in pectin and acid but thin in aroma, raspberries less so on both counts, so a handful of the latter lifts a fruit that can otherwise taste merely sharp. The same pairing appears in raspberry-and-redcurrant jam. The instruction to check the berries for grubs is a reminder that fruit often reached the Victorian kitchen straight from the garden or the costermonger's barrow, unsorted, and that looking it over was part of the recipe rather than an afterthought.