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Maple Syrup Tarts
2 tablespoons Five Roses flour 1 egg (beaten light) 1 cup maple syrup Butter size of walnut 1 teaspoon vanilla Moisten the flour with water. Mix ingredients together, and cook over hot water till slightly thickened. Cool, then pour into tart shells and bake. May be covered with whipped cream or meringue made with white of egg.
A maple custard thickened on the stovetop and finished in tart shells. The one thing the original leaves out is that the filling is already cooked when it goes in, so the baking is only to set the top and colour the pastry.
- Butter size of a walnutRoughly 1 tablespoon, about 15 g. Shelled walnut, not the whole nut in its shell.
- Moisten the flourSlake the 2 tablespoons of flour with a tablespoon or two of cold water to a smooth thin paste before it meets anything else. Added dry to warm syrup it will lump and no amount of stirring over hot water will fix it.
- Keep the water below a boilThis is an egg custard. Cook it in a bowl over barely simmering water, stirring, until it coats the spoon; if the water boils hard the egg scrambles and the filling turns grainy. The recipe gives no time, only 'till slightly thickened.'
- Maple syrupUse real maple syrup, not pancake syrup, which is corn syrup with flavouring and behaves differently in both sweetness and set. Any grade works; darker syrup gives a stronger maple flavour.
- Tart shellsThe recipe does not say whether the shells go in raw or already baked. Since the filling is cooked beforehand, blind-baking or part-baking the shells first is the safer route.
- OvenThe recipe names no heat at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, for 10-15 minutes is enough to set the surface. If you use meringue, bake until the peaks are lightly browned; whipped cream goes on only after the tarts are cold.
- The second egg whiteThe recipe uses one whole egg in the filling and then suggests a meringue "made with white of egg" - that means a second egg. One white with 2 tablespoons of sugar covers a small batch.
- YieldRoughly 8 to 10 small tart shells. There is only about a cup and a half of filling, so it would make a shallow layer in a single 8-inch shell. The filling is very sweet, so small is better.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to promote its Five Roses flour, and it circulated in enormous numbers through Canadian kitchens in the early twentieth century - one of those books obtained by users of the flour and then kept for decades. Maple recipes sit in it as a matter of course rather than as a novelty: in maple-producing regions of Quebec and Ontario, syrup and soft maple sugar were a sweetener a household might have in quantity in spring, and recipes like this one follow sugar-pie logic - egg, a little flour, butter and a cup of something sweet - with the local sweetener standing in for molasses or brown sugar. The family resemblance to Quebec's tarte au sirop d'érable and to the sugar pies of the same tradition is close, though here the filling is cooked first on the stove, a cautious method that gives a reliable set without depending on the oven of a wood range.