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Fruit Tarts, Preserved
Line a dish with puff paste, and fill with any kind of preserved fruit; lay bars across, cut them with a tin-cutter; finish off neatly by laying an edging of paste round the border, and ornamenting it tastefully. Bake a very light brown.
A lattice-topped jam tart in four lines, written for cooks who already knew how puff paste behaves. The gaps are all in temperature and in what "preserved fruit" meant on a Victorian shelf.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. Puff paste generally wants a hot oven, around 400-425F in modern terms. The instruction to "bake a very light brown" refers to the pastry, not the filling; watch it rather than trusting a set time, as the depth of the dish will change how long it takes.
- Preserved fruitThis means fruit already put up, whether bottled in syrup or made into jam, rather than fresh. Bottled fruit should be drained well, and the filling kept shallow so it does not boil up over the lattice.
- Line a dishThe recipe does not specify; a shallow pie plate or tart tin suits the lattice form. Puff paste under a wet filling tends to stay pale and soft underneath, so bake on a preheated baking sheet in the lower third of the oven.
- Tin-cutterA fluted pastry wheel or a strip cutter. Cut the bars about 1/2 inch wide, and chill them flat for ten minutes before laying them on so they hold their shape.
- The borderThe "edging of paste round the border" is a second strip laid over the rim to seal the ends of the lattice. Brush the rim with water first, press down lightly, and knock up the cut edge with the back of a knife so the layers can rise.
- GlazeNo glaze is mentioned in the recipe. Beaten egg or egg white with a dusting of caster sugar will give a light brown finish if one is wanted.
- YieldThe recipe gives no dish size, so the yield depends entirely on the plate used. Best eaten the day it is made, as the jam softens the pastry underneath overnight.
Tarts of this kind sat at the thrifty end of Victorian pastry work: a household that had put up currants, damsons or apricots in summer could produce a creditable sweet in midwinter with nothing more than a scrap of puff paste and a jar from the store cupboard. The lattice is not only decoration - open bars let steam escape from a wet filling, though in the European jam tarts where the form recurs, from the Austrian Linzertorte to the Italian crostata, it is at least as much decorative and conventional. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the later nineteenth century for a broad middle-class readership, is characteristically terse here because puff paste is treated at length elsewhere in the book; entries like this one assume the reader will look it up. The phrase "ornamenting it tastefully" reflects a kitchen culture in which the appearance of a plain tart was expected to carry some of the credit for it.