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Prune and Apple Tart
1/2 lb. stoned prunes I lemon 3 lbs. apples 1/2 lb. (I cup) sugar Pastry 1 egg Wash and stone the prunes; peel, core, and slice the apples. Put them into a casserole, sprinkle in the sugar and the grated rind of the lemon.
Cover neatly with pastry, brush over the top with beaten egg, and bake in a hot oven for about threequarters of an hour. Sprinkle over with sugar and serve hot or cold. 1/2 lb. prunes 1½ lemon
A deep-dish fruit pie baked in the casserole itself, from a period when "casserole" meant the vessel rather than the dish. A few gaps in the original need filling before you start.
- Soak the prunes firstThis is the hinge. Dried prunes put in raw with the apples will not soften in 45 minutes and will stay leathery. Cover them with hot water or tea for an hour, drain well, then use — and note the recipe says both "stoned prunes" and "stone the prunes," so buy pitted and skip the stoning.
- Hot oven425F/220C. The pastry needs that heat to set and colour while the fruit beneath steams.
- The pastry is not specifiedA plain shortcrust made with 8 oz flour and 4 oz fat covers a 9-10 inch casserole with enough overhang to seal to the rim. The book presumably expected the reader to have a standing pastry recipe.
- Quantities1/2 lb prunes is about 1 1/2 cups dried; 3 lb apples is six to seven large ones, which will mound well above the rim of a normal dish. Use a deep casserole and expect the fruit to sink as it cooks.
- The lemonOnly the grated rind is called for. Add the juice as well if your apples are sweet — prunes and sugar together make this a very sweet tart otherwise.
- No added liquidCorrect as written. Apples and soaked prunes give off plenty of juice, and any extra water will boil up and lift the pastry lid.
- Steam ventCut a slit or two in the lid. The original does not say so, but a sealed crust over 3 lb of wet fruit will crack somewhere of its own accord.
- The trailing textThe stray "1/2 lb. prunes 1 1/2 lemon" at the end appears to be a fragment of the ingredient column rather than a second set of quantities.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Good hot with cream, and firmer and easier to cut cold the next day.
Prunes and apples are a natural winter pairing in British and American kitchens: apples kept in the loft or cellar until spring, prunes bought dried by the pound and kept indefinitely, so a fruit tart was possible in February when nothing fresh was to be had but apples. Casserole cookery books of the early twentieth century were selling a then-novel convenience — the flameproof earthenware or fireproof glass dish that went from oven to table, saving both a serving dish and the washing of it. That may be why a recipe that would elsewhere be called a deep-dish pie appears here with no pie plate in sight. The word itself comes through French from Provençal cassa, a pan or ladle, and in this period it was still commonly used of the pot rather than the contents.