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English Apple Tart
Core and pare tart apples; stew whole with as little water as possible till tender, though unbroken. Line the edges of a baking dish with thin pie paste; fill centre of the dish with the apples, in the middle of each dropping a little orange or other marmalade. Cover the top with a lattice of pastry strips and bake quickly till brown. Serve hot.
A straightforward dish whose only difficulty is keeping the apples whole through both the stewing and the baking. The pastry is a lining for the rim and a lattice on top only — this is not a fully lined tart shell.
- "Bake quickly"A quick oven is usually taken as roughly 400-450F. The apples are already cooked, so the bake is only to set and colour the pastry; 20 to 25 minutes is generally enough.
- Keeping the apples unbrokenThis is the hinge of the recipe. Stew them in a wide pan in a single layer with a few tablespoons of water, covered, over low heat, and stop the moment a skewer slides in. Firm cooking apples that hold their shape work far better than a variety that collapses to sauce.
- "Tart apples"A firm, acid cooking apple rather than a sweet eating one: Bramley, Rhode Island Greening, Northern Spy and the like all answer. Modern dessert apples are sweeter and softer; if using them, cut the sugar in whatever you serve alongside.
- Pie pasteAn ordinary shortcrust. Line only the rim of the dish, pressing a strip of pastry onto the moistened edge, then lay the lattice across the top and seal it to that rim.
- Marmalade in the coreThe cored cavity is the obvious place for it, so it helps to core from the stem end without cutting through the base. Roughly a teaspoon per apple; the recipe names orange marmalade but explicitly allows any other, and apricot or quince works the same way.
- No sugar in the recipeNone is called for; the sweetness comes from the marmalade alone. With genuinely tart apples you may want a spoonful of sugar in the stewing water, or a sweetened cream at table.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; reckon one apple per person and choose the dish accordingly. Serve hot, as directed.
The tart described here belongs to an older English tradition in which "tart" often meant fruit under a pastry lid rather than the open, pastry-lined case the word suggests today, though open and covered forms existed alongside one another. Whole apples baked or stewed with a filled core are a long-standing English domestic form, and the marmalade in the centre may reflect the household habit of keeping preserves on hand year-round as a way of adding flavour and sweetness out of season. Books of fruit cookery multiplied in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, when commercial orcharding and better rail transport made apples cheap and constant.