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Strawberry Tart
Line sides of large or small pans or baking dishes with pastry and bake a light brown. Fill then with strawberry jam or fresh berries and serve (dished) with a meringue or whipped cream. Or finish with lattice strips as for English Apple Tart and brown.
A skeleton recipe of the sort common in turn-of-the-century fruit books: it assumes the cook already has a pastry recipe and knows how to blind-bake. The points below fill in what the original leaves unsaid.
- Blind-bake properly"Line sides... and bake a light brown" means baking the shell empty before filling. Line the chilled pastry with parchment and beans or pie weights at 400F for about 15 minutes, then remove the weights and bake another 8-12 minutes until the base is dry and pale gold. Without weights the sides slump and the base domes.
- Two different tarts hereFilling a baked shell with fresh berries and topping with cream is an unbaked assembly, finished at the last minute. The lattice version goes back into the oven with the fruit inside; a modern working figure is 400-425F for 25-35 minutes until the juices bubble. Note that the original bakes the shell light brown first in every version, so if you plan to lattice and return it to the oven you may want to stop short of a full blind bake.
- Fresh berries need helpRaw strawberries in a baked shell weep. Either macerate and drain them, or toss with a little sugar and cornstarch and cook briefly to a loose compote, then cool before filling. Jam, offered here as an equal alternative, has the practical advantage of holding its shape.
- MeringueIf you finish with meringue, use roughly 2 tablespoons sugar per egg white, beaten to stiff glossy peaks, spread to touch the pastry edge all round, and brown at 350F for 12-15 minutes. Meringue browned over cold fruit will slide; it wants a warm surface underneath.
- "Dished"An older term for serving on a dish rather than in the tin. The recipe also mentions baking dishes, so it need not always mean the tart is turned out.
- PansA 9-inch tart tin or pie plate will take about one standard pastry round and 3-4 cups of prepared fruit. "Small pans" probably points to individual tartlet tins, roughly 3 inches across, which bake in appreciably less time.
- YieldA 9-inch tart serves six to eight. Assemble the fresh-berry version within an hour or two of serving; the pastry softens quickly once the fruit goes in.
The distinction the book takes for granted is the familiar English one between a tart, baked in a shallow open case, and a pie with a full lid, though the two words were used loosely in practice. Strawberries were a brief, largely local crop before refrigerated freight made them a year-round item, which may be why jam appears as an equal alternative to fresh berries rather than a poor substitute.