Prune Tart
Line sides of baking-dish with pastry and fill middle of dish with fresh or soaked, pitted prunes. Sprinkle over them sugar with a tablespoon of flour and bake. When fruit is tender and juicy pour over it the yolks of three eggs, beaten with a spoonful of cream, one-half cup each of sugar and cake crumbs. Bake till done when place on top a meringue made with the whites of the eggs and half a cup of sugar flavoured with vanilla. Let brown.
A three-stage tart: fruit baked under sugar and flour, then a custard poured over it, then a meringue. The original assumes you know when each stage is finished, so the numbers below fill in the gaps.
- Prunes"Fresh prunes" here most likely means fresh prune plums (the Italian type), not the fresh form of a dried prune. Dried prunes should be soaked in hot water or tea until plump, an hour or so, then drained well; excess soaking liquid will thin the custard.
- PastryOnly the sides are lined, so the fruit sits on the dish itself. If you would rather line the base as well, blind-bake it at 400F for 15 minutes before filling, or the juice will soak it.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given anywhere. Start the fruit at 400F for 20-25 minutes to set the pastry, drop to 350F for the custard, and finish the meringue at 325-350F until the peaks colour, 12-15 minutes.
- Sugar over the fruitJudge by the plums: about half a cup for tart fresh fruit, considerably less for soaked dried prunes, which are already sweet. The tablespoon of flour is there to thicken the juice, not to sweeten.
- Cake crumbsDry sponge or pound-cake crumbs, not fresh soft cake. They absorb juice and give the custard body. Fine dry breadcrumbs work, though the result is plainer.
- "A spoonful of cream"Three yolks with a single tablespoon of cream and half a cup of sugar makes a very stiff mixture. Two to three tablespoons of cream gives something pourable that will still set.
- Custard doneness"Bake till done" means the custard is set at the edges with a slight wobble at the centre, roughly 20 minutes at 350F. Overbaking curdles it, and the meringue stage adds more heat.
- MeringueThree whites to half a cup of sugar is a soft meringue. Beat to soft peaks before adding the sugar a spoonful at a time, and spread it so it touches the pastry all round, which stops it shrinking and weeping.
- YieldThe recipe names no dish size; the quantities suit an 8- or 9-inch dish, six to eight servings. Best eaten the day it is made; the meringue weeps in the refrigerator.
Prunes kept and travelled where fresh plums could not, and by the late nineteenth century California orchards were shipping dried plums across the country in quantity. The construction here -- fruit baked in pastry, then bound with an egg custard and crowned with meringue -- is a familiar one, and similar tarts were made with other fruits. The cake crumbs use up stale sponge to soak up fruit juice that would otherwise make the tart soggy.