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Cream Tarts
1 cup sour cream 1 cup sugar 3 eggs Flavor with lemon Bake in undercrust. Put a few currants on top of each tart, if desired.
A terse farm-kitchen custard tart: five ingredients, no method beyond "bake in undercrust." The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- "Undercrust" means shells onlyLine tart tins or a muffin pan with short pastry and leave the tops open. No lid, no lattice — the currants sit on the exposed custard.
- The sour cream has changedIn a farm household of this period this would generally have been separated cream left to sour naturally: thick, tangy, and considerably richer than the standard supermarket product. Full-fat cultured sour cream is the closest match; creme fraiche gives a richer set. Avoid light or fat-free versions, which are usually thickened with gums and starches and tend to weep in the oven.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A workable modern approach is to start at 425F for about 10 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 325-350F for the custard. Held at high heat throughout, an egg-and-cream filling tends to curdle and puff, then collapse.
- Judging donenessPull the tarts when the centres still wobble slightly; residual heat finishes the set. A filling baked until firm all through will be grainy and will pull away from the crust as it cools.
- "Flavor with lemon"Grated zest of one lemon is the most likely intention and the better result, though period books used rind, juice and lemon extract interchangeably. If you use extract, a teaspoon is plenty; a tablespoon of juice also works but thins the mixture slightly.
- CurrantsAlmost certainly dried currants rather than fresh red or black ones, though the recipe does not say. Plumping them in hot water for ten minutes helps keep them from scorching on top of the custard.
- Yield and sweetnessOne cup of cream with three eggs makes roughly two cups of filling: about eight to ten 3-inch tarts, or one shallow 8-inch shell. A full cup of sugar is very sweet by current taste; two-thirds of a cup still sets.
- ServingCool to room temperature at least. Warm custard tarts slump when lifted from the tin, and the flavour of the soured cream reads better once cold.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its Five Roses flour, and its contents were drawn largely from recipes sent in by Canadian users of the flour — which is why entries like this one are written as shorthand notes between cooks who already knew what a tart shell was. Sour cream appears often in such collections because a farm household separating its own cream would have had some going acid, and baking was one standard way to use it. The dish belongs to the long European line of baked cream-and-egg tarts, from medieval custard tarts through the sugar pies and cream pies of North American farm baking; currants were a common finishing touch on English cheesecakes and similar tarts.