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Raspberry and Cream Tart
Roll out a thin puff-paste, lay it in a patty-pan, put in raspberries, and strew finely-powdered loaf sugar over them. Put on a lid of the paste; and when baked enough, cut the lid open, and put in half a pint of cream, the yolks of two eggs well beaten, and a little sugar.
The pastry work here is straightforward Victorian raised-lid tart making, but the finish is not: raw egg yolks are stirred into cream and poured into an already-baked case with no further cooking. That step is the reason this page carries a caution.
- The uncooked yolksTwo raw yolks beaten into half a pint of cream and poured into a tart that has come out of the oven will not reliably reach a temperature that destroys Salmonella. The residual heat of a shallow fruit tart is unpredictable and the cream itself is cold going in, so the mixture sits in the danger zone rather than passing through it. If you want a raspberry tart with a cream custard, use a current recipe in which the custard is cooked.
- Cream that is not what it wasDairy in this period was unpasteurised, and the recipe's instruction to pour cream in uncooked at the last moment reflects a supply and handling regime unlike a modern one. The book itself says nothing about the cream's source or age.
- Patty-panNot a modern muffin tin. A patty-pan is a shallow tin for a single small pie or tart; sizes varied. The recipe gives no diameter, so the quantities are elastic.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml, noticeably more than a US half-pint. Against two yolks that is a very loose custard even if it were cooked.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a solid cone and broken up with nippers, then crushed and sifted at home. 'Finely-powdered loaf sugar' corresponds roughly to caster or icing sugar; the modern equivalent needs no preparation.
- No quantity of fruit or sugarThe recipe gives no amounts for either the raspberries or the sugar; both are left to the cook.
History: Baking a covered fruit tart, cutting the lid open while it is hot and pouring in a cream-and-egg mixture is a technique found in eighteenth-century English receipt books and still present in Victorian household manuals. The same construction was applied to other fruits, such as gooseberries and currants.