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Orange Tart or Tartlets
Take two Seville oranges and double their weight in refined sugar. Peel off the rinds thinly, and boil in a little water until tender, then pound them in a mortar, and mix with them the pulp of the fruit which has been freed from the pips and juice, the sugar, and half an ounce of fresh butter. Line the edges of a tart-dish with good puff-paste, put in the orange mixture, cover the dish with crust, fasten the edges securely, and bake in a moderate oven. Or, line some patty-pans with puff-pastry, half fill them with the orange mixture, lay narrow strips of pastry over them as an ornament, and bake as before. Time to bake the tart, three-quarters of an hour; the tartlets, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A closed marmalade tart in all but name: the filling is candied rind, pulp and a great deal of sugar, so the sweetness is deliberate rather than a misprint. A few of the instructions assume Victorian equipment and a Victorian orange.
- Seville orangesThese are the bitter marmalade oranges, in the shops for only a few weeks in mid-winter, and the bitterness is what keeps the filling from cloying. If you cannot get them, the nearest substitute is sweet oranges with a good squeeze of lemon juice, though the result is a milder tart.
- "Double their weight in sugar"Weigh the whole fruit before peeling: two Sevilles typically run about 250-300 g, so roughly 500-600 g of sugar. That is a marmalade proportion.
- Boiling the rindsThin-pared rind wants 30-45 minutes at a gentle simmer, topped up with water, until a strip gives no resistance to a knife tip. Underboiled peel stays leathery and no amount of pounding will fix it.
- PoundingA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar did in ten minutes. Pulse rather than run it, so the rind stays in visible shreds instead of turning to purée.
- "Half an ounce of fresh butter"About 15 g, and fresh here means unsalted, as opposed to the salted keeping butter of the period.
- A moderate oven350F / 175C. Puff pastry generally prefers a hotter start, so if the lid is browning too slowly at the end, finish the last ten minutes at 400F / 200C rather than extending the time.
- How the tart is builtNote that only the edges of the dish are lined with pastry, not the base. The filling goes straight into the dish and the pastry lid is sealed onto that rim, so there is no bottom crust at all.
- Patty-pansSmall shallow tartlet tins; a standard 12-hole bun tin works. They are only half filled, presumably to allow for the filling rising as it bakes.
- Yield and costThree or four servings for the large tart; the recipe does not say how many tartlets the mixture makes. The "probable cost, 6d" is one of Cassell's standing features and is of no use except as a period price.
Orange tarts of this kind are considerably older than Cassell's, appearing in English receipt books from the seventeenth century onward, when Seville oranges arrived in winter shipments from Spain and Portugal and were candied, preserved or turned into marmalade to make them last. The filling here is essentially marmalade baked in pastry: rind boiled tender, pulp, and twice the fruit's weight in sugar, a ratio that belongs to preserving rather than to baking. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, and the "probable cost, 6d" line is standard throughout the book, every dish being priced in the same way. The bitter orange itself was long treated as a distinct kitchen ingredient from the sweet orange, valued for its sharp rind and sour juice; that distinction has largely faded from British shops outside the brief marmalade season.