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Pippin Tarts
Take half a dozen Flanders pippins, or any other good cooking apples, pare and core them, and put them into a saucepan with a little butter, and water sufficient only to prevent them burning. Let them simmer until they begin to fall, then add four ounces of moist sugar, and the strained juice and finely-minced rind of a Seville orange. Boil and stir the mixture until it thickens, then turn it out to cool. Put it into tartlet shells already baked, and serve cold. Time, about half an hour to boil the apples. Probable cost, 9d. for the apple paste. Sufficient--according to the size of the pippins.
A cooked apple marmalade spooned cold into pre-baked tartlet cases. The whole dish rests on reducing the apple far enough that it holds its shape in the pastry rather than weeping into it.
- The hinge: cook it down properlyAfter the sugar goes in, keep boiling and stirring until the mass mounds on the spoon and a track drawn across the pan bottom stays open for a second. Underdone apple paste will soak the shells within an hour of filling.
- Flanders pippinsAn apple name found in Victorian fruit lists and no longer in general commerce. Any apple that collapses on cooking works: Bramley is the closest in acidity, and McIntosh will do. Six medium apples is roughly 2 lb before paring.
- Moist sugarVictorian moist sugar was unrefined and damp, closest to today's light brown sugar. Four ounces is about half a cup packed. White granulated works but gives a paler, flatter flavour.
- Seville orangesThe bitter marmalade orange, in British shops only from late December through February. Out of season, use the juice of one lemon plus the zest of a sweet orange, which approximates the sharpness without the bitterness.
- Very little water"water sufficient only to prevent them burning" means two or three tablespoons in a heavy pan over low heat. Any more and it will have to be boiled off again.
- Tartlet shellsShortcrust, blind-baked and completely cold. Fill as close to serving as you can manage; these are at their best within a few hours.
- Yield and costAround 2 cups of apple paste; the recipe declines to fix a number, saying only that it is sufficient 'according to the size of the pippins'. The 9d. is the price of the filling alone, as the text states.
- KeepingThe paste itself holds a week refrigerated in a covered jar and stiffens as it chills, so make it ahead and fill at the last moment.
Cassell's places this among its apple preparations at a time when the English kitchen still distinguished sharply between named cooking apples, and the pippin — a term originally meaning an apple raised from seed rather than grafted — carried real weight on a market stall. The Flanders pippin, like the Norfolk Beefing and dozens of others, has largely fallen out of cultivation, a casualty of the twentieth-century collapse in commercial apple varieties. The Seville orange is the giveaway that this is a winter dish: bitter oranges arrive in Britain for only a few weeks after Christmas, the same short season that supplied the marmalade pan, and here the juice serves as a sharpener for cooked fruit. Cooking apples down with sugar to a stiff paste is much older than the book, descending from the medieval and Tudor practice of making fruit "pastes" and "cheeses" dense enough to slice, and the tartlet here is a lighter, later expression of the same idea.