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Pinner Tart
Line an open tart tin with short crust, and fill it with the following mixture. Two ounces of fine cake crumbs, four ounces of golden syrup, the finely-grated rind of a lemon with half the juice. These ingredients should all be well blended together. Bake in a quick oven for a quarter of an hour, and just before serving put leaves of baked pastry on as a garnish.
A miniature relation of treacle tart, and one that stands or falls on the crumb-to-syrup ratio. The original assumes a small open tin and a hot oven.
- Quick ovenBroadly 400-450F (200-230C). Fifteen minutes at that heat should be enough to set a shallow syrup filling and colour the crust; longer baking risks the syrup darkening and setting hard as it cools.
- The proportionsTwo ounces of cake crumbs is roughly a cup, loosely packed; four ounces of golden syrup is about a third of a cup by volume. That is twice as much syrup as crumb by weight, which gives a filling that stays soft and slightly runny rather than the firm, sliceable set of a modern breadcrumb treacle tart.
- Cake crumbs, not breadcrumbsThe recipe specifies only "fine cake crumbs", presumably dry and sieved from whatever plain cake was to hand. They are sweeter than bread, so substituting fresh breadcrumbs will give a less sweet filling; dry the breadcrumbs in a low oven first if you use them.
- Golden syrupStill sold under the same name: a pale refiners' syrup. Light corn syrup is not a substitute, having none of the flavour; mild molasses or dark treacle will overwhelm the lemon.
- Blind bake the shellFifteen minutes is short for raw short crust under a wet filling. Line and bake the case blind until the base is dry and just coloured, then fill and return it to the oven.
- The pastry leavesCut them from the trimmings, bake them separately on a flat sheet, and set them on the tart after it comes out. Baked in place they would sink into the syrup.
- Size and yieldThe recipe gives no tin size. The quantities are small and suit a single shallow open tart. Serve just warm, not hot, or the filling runs.
Golden syrup gave Victorian and Edwardian cooks a cheap, clean-tasting sweetener with none of the bitterness of dark treacle, and a whole family of crumb-and-syrup tarts followed it into print; the syrup itself is generally traced to the Lyle refinery at Plaistow in the 1880s. Pinner was then a village in Middlesex rather than a London suburb, and the tart's name carries no documented connection to the place. What distinguishes this one from the standard treacle tart is the cake crumbs, and the lemon rind and juice are there to cut a filling that would otherwise be little more than sweetened syrup.