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Raspberry Tart
Fill a pie-dish with picked raspberries, or, if preferred, with equal portions of raspberries and red currants. Line the edges of the dish with pastry, strew sugar over the fruit, and cover it with pastry rolled out to the thickness of a quarter of an inch. Ornament the edges, and bake the tart till the pastry is done enough. When cold sift powdered sugar over the top, and serve. Raspberry tart is not very often served hot. When a superior one is required, bake the tart till the pastry is done enough. Take it out of the oven, gently lift up the cover, and pour over the fruit a rich custard made with half a pint of cream which has been beaten up with the yolks of two eggs. Lay the cover again on the dish, and return it to the oven for five minutes. Sift powdered sugar over the top, and serve hot or cold. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour for a moderate-sized tart.
A Victorian deep-dish fruit tart: a pie-dish of raw fruit under a single pastry lid, with no thickener and no bottom crust. A few conventions need translating.
- There is no bottom crust"Line the edges of the dish" means pressing a strip of pastry around the rim of the pie-dish so the lid has something to seal to. The fruit sits directly on the dish, and the tart is served from it rather than turned out.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the word "moderate" in this recipe refers to the size of the tart, not the oven. A modern equivalent for the stated three-quarters of an hour is around 350F/180C. If your pastry is puff or rough puff, you may prefer to start at 400F/200C for 15 minutes to set the layers, then drop to 350F for the remainder.
- Sugar quantityNone is given. For about 1½ lb of fruit in a medium pie-dish, 4 to 6 tablespoons is right; use the higher figure if you include red currants, which are markedly sharper than raspberries.
- Half a pint of creamAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups. Beaten with two yolks it is a very loose custard by design, meant to soak into the fruit rather than set into a slice.
- The custard versionPour it over fruit that is still piping hot, straight from the oven, and expect the five minutes to be a minimum rather than a rule. Two yolks in 10 oz of cream thicken slowly; give it ten minutes if the surface still looks watery, and serve it that day.
- Expect juiceRaspberries collapse into a great deal of liquid with nothing to hold it, and this recipe adds no thickener. If you want it tighter, toss the fruit with a tablespoon of cornflour along with the sugar.
- Cut a ventNot mentioned, but a slit or two in the lid keeps steam from lifting the pastry off the rim, which matters more here than in a tart with a base to anchor it.
- YieldA "moderate-sized" pie-dish holds around 1½ to 2 lb of fruit and serves six.
Raspberries and red currants ripen together in an English garden, and the pairing in this entry is a practical one as much as a matter of taste: currants are the richer of the two in pectin, so the filling tastes brighter and may run a shade less freely. The deep pie-dish covered with a single sheet of pastry is the characteristic English form of fruit pie, distinct from the pastry-lined French tarte, and this entry uses "tart" for it. The upgrade at the end — lifting the baked lid, flooding the fruit with cream and yolks, and replacing the crust — is a device that appears in English cookery books before the Victorian period as well. That the book pauses to note raspberry tart "is not very often served hot" is a reminder that the tart was as likely to appear cold on the supper table as hot after dinner.