Apple Tart
Fill a baking dish with apple sauce mixed with two tablespoons of apricot or lemon marmalade. Finish as for apple custard pie, dotting the top with chopped citron or candied cherries or angelica. Or a simple meringue may be substituted.
This is a shorthand entry that assumes you have just read the recipe for apple custard pie a page or two earlier, so the first job is to supply the parts it leaves out.
- What "finish as for apple custard pie" meansThe recipe does not say, and without the earlier pie recipe to hand you have to choose. The likeliest reading is a thin egg-and-milk custard poured over the fruit and baked until just set; the alternative is that the surface is simply glazed, decorated and returned to the oven long enough to firm. Decide which you are making before you start, because the two want different temperatures.
- Oven temperatureA custard finish wants 325-350F and should be pulled when the centre still trembles; carry-over heat sets it. A meringue finish wants 325-350F for 12-15 minutes for a dry, lightly coloured shell, or 400F for 5-6 minutes if you prefer it soft inside.
- The applesauce must be thickThis is the hinge. Loose, watery sauce will weep into a custard or slide out from under meringue. Cook it down until a spoon drawn through leaves a channel, and sweeten before it goes in the dish, since the marmalade alone will not carry it.
- Tart, not tart shellNothing here says pastry, and "baking dish" is meant literally, whatever the title suggests. If you want a crust, blind-bake a shortcrust shell fully before filling, or the wet sauce will make it sodden.
- MarmaladeTwo tablespoons is a flavouring, not a sweetener. The apricot gives the glaze note familiar from pastry work; a bitter lemon marmalade will cut the sweetness of the sauce noticeably more.
- Citron and angelicaCandied citron is the peel of a thick-rinded citrus, sold at Christmas or from baking suppliers. Candied angelica, the green stem of the herb, is now scarce outside specialist shops; candied cherries or chopped candied orange peel stand in without loss.
- If you use meringueTwo egg whites to four tablespoons of caster sugar covers a dish of about eight inches. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all the way round, which is what stops it shrinking and sliding.
- YieldThe recipe gives no dish size or number of servings; a dish of the eight-inch size assumed above will feed roughly six. It is better warm or at room temperature than chilled, which mutes the apple.
The apricot glaze and the confetti of citron, candied cherry and angelica are borrowed from professional pastry work, where such candied fruits were a common decoration. Angelica, candied from the stems of Angelica archangelica, was one of the few green decorations available to a Victorian or Edwardian pastry kitchen. The compression of the instructions is the point of interest here: the book has evidently already given a full apple custard pie, and this entry is written as a variation on it, so the reader has to work back across the section rather than treat the page as self-contained.