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Tarts, Sugar Icing For
The appearance of tarts made in the ordinary way, and with all kinds of fruit, is very much improved by icing them. In order to do this proceed as follows. Line the edges of the dish with good crust, fill it with fruit and a little sugar, lay on the cover, press down the edges, and trim them neatly. Make a small hole at each side for the steam to escape, then before putting the tart in the oven, brush it over with cold water, and sift white sugar thickly upon it. Or, when the tart is nearly baked, take it out, brush it over with white of egg whisked to froth; sift white sugar on this and sprinkle a little water on the top. If necessary, lay a sheet of writing-paper over it to keep it from acquiring too much colour. Time to bake, half an hour for a moderate-sized tart.
This is a finishing technique rather than a filling recipe: two ways to give a covered fruit tart a crisp sugar glaze. A few of the assumptions behind it need spelling out.
- The dish is not a modern pie plate"Line the edges of the dish with good crust" describes the British deep-dish fruit tart: a pastry rim around the lip of a pie dish, fruit heaped inside, and a single sheet of pastry laid over the top. There is no bottom crust.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given, and "moderate-sized" in the original describes the tart rather than the oven. In modern practice a covered fruit tart is usually started hot to set and colour the pastry and then finished lower. The half hour quoted suits a shallow tart with soft fruit; firm apples or plums are likely to want longer.
- Sifted white sugarWhite sugar was still often sold as loaf or lump, to be crushed and sifted to the fineness wanted, though ready-refined granulated sugar was also available by the date of this book. Use caster or superfine sugar, which melts into a glaze; granulated stays gritty.
- Two methods, two resultsWater and sugar before baking gives a thin crackled crust of caramelised sugar. Egg white whisked to a froth, applied near the end, gives a thicker opaque meringue-like finish. The recipe offers them as alternatives; do not combine them.
- Timing the egg-white glaze"Nearly baked" means the last few minutes of baking. Applied much earlier the egg white can brown unevenly; applied right at the end it may not set.
- The sheet of writing-paperA loose sheet of parchment or foil laid over the top does the same job of shielding the glaze while the fruit finishes.
- Steam ventsThe two side holes matter more than they look. With no bottom crust, juice rising as steam has nowhere to go but under the lid, and a sealed top will lift, split, or boil over onto the oven floor.
Icing a tart in this way belongs to a period when refined white sugar had become cheap enough in British households to be used decoratively rather than sparingly. Through the eighteenth century sugar was bought as a hard cone or loaf, broken with nippers and pounded, and a thick sifting of it over a pastry lid was a visible statement about the table; by the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century, factory-refined sugar had made the gesture common enough to be set down as a general principle rather than a special recipe. The egg-white-and-sugar version is essentially a thin meringue, and similar sugar-and-egg-white finishes appear on pastry in both French and English cookery of the period. This entry is not a dish but a method, meant to be applied to any of the fruit tarts elsewhere in the book.