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Creamed Apple Tart
3 cups sliced apples 3/4 cup brown sugar Grated rind of half a lemon Juice of half a lemon 2 cups boiled custard Once the rule for plain paste Line a small, deep pudding dish with pastry, add the apples, sugar and lemon, cover with the upper paste and bake for forty minutes. When done lift the crust and pour in the boiled custard. Return the cover and serve ice cold. Whipped cream may be used for filling. In this case heap it high and do not put on the cover again.
A double-crust apple pie whose top is lifted after baking so a stirred custard can be poured into the hot fruit. Two things decide whether it works: the pastry lid must come off in one piece, and the tart must be thoroughly chilled before it is cut.
- "Once the rule for plain paste"This means one full batch of the book's plain pastry, enough for a top and bottom crust. Any standard double-crust recipe substitutes directly.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Bake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then reduce to 375F for the remaining 25 minutes or so, until the apples give no resistance to a skewer through the steam vent.
- Boiled custardIn this period the term means a stirred stovetop custard — milk, egg yolks, sugar, cooked to a coating consistency over low heat or in a double boiler. It is not baked and it is not thick like pastry cream; it should pour. Cook it to 170-180F and cool it fully before use.
- Lifting the crustCut the top crust free around the rim with a thin knife while the tart is still hot, and slide a wide offset spatula under it. Cutting the vent slits as a few clean radial lines rather than a decorative pattern keeps it from crumbling.
- Pour cool custard, not warmTwo cups of custard added to a hot, juicy filling will thin out and soak the base. Let the tart stand until barely warm, add the custard, then chill for at least three hours. The instruction to serve it ice cold is doing structural work, not just setting a temperature.
- The pudding dish"Small, deep pudding dish" is not a standard size; a deep-dish pie plate or a small round casserole will serve. The depth matters, since two cups of custard has to go somewhere.
- ApplesThree cups of slices is about three medium apples, a little over a pound. Use a variety that holds its shape — Braeburn, Granny Smith, Northern Spy — since apples that collapse will leave no room for the custard.
- The whipped cream versionHeaping whipped cream on the hot fruit will melt it. Chill the tart first, then pile the cream on and serve at once. The recipe gives no yield; a dish this size would serve about six.
Gold Medal's cook books were promotional literature for Washburn-Crosby's flour, and pastry chapters in such books tended to build outward from a single "plain paste" rule that the reader was expected to have already learned — hence the shorthand "once the rule," meaning one batch. The dish itself is finished after baking: the crust is lifted, something soft is introduced, and the lid goes back. Boiled custard, a stovetop preparation, appears constantly in American cookery of the period as a sauce, a filling and a dessert in its own right, and required no oven space at a time when a single range was doing everything at once. Serving the result ice cold may reflect the growing presence of the domestic icebox.