Tart
TARTLET. - Many people connect this word in Tart, Tartlet their minds with the adjective tart, imagine that it must have something to do with the tartness of fruit, and therefore identify it with a fruit pie. Under this hallucination they cease to speak of an apple pie-they insist on calling it an apple tart. A pie in their view is always for meat; a tart is for fruit; and some of the most popular cookery books have caught the delusion and done their best to spread it. A tart has nothing to do with tartness; it is identical with the French tourte and tarte, the old name for a kind of loaf, and with tartine, which still exists as a name for a slice of loaf. It is the Latin torta (from torqueo), which answers nearly enough to our Roll of bread. Now, our fathers were in the middle ages rather deficient in plates, and it is curious to read of the little odd contrivances by which at grand feasts they tried to supply the want, and to make one plate do for two or three guests. Some genius discovered that the undercrust of bread would serve for a plate, and for a long period in France the undercrust of the tourte or tarte was the most common of dinner-plates-at which period a family were wont, after eating their dinner, to eat their dinner-plates. These dinner-plates, made of dinner rolls, were in course of time specially prepared, were made more cakelike, were filled with dainty food, and were called, according to their size, tarts or tartlets. The strict meaning of a tart, therefore, is an open crust of the nature of a plate; and it is to be hoped that after this explanation we shall not very often hear anybody call an apple pie an apple tart.
A tart or tartlet being a flat cake or crust, in form of a plate or dish, or little saucer, the question is how to make it. It can be made of any of the pastes described in the article on pastry; but in England it is generally made of the lighter pastes, in France of the more solid. This is because in England, save in the case of tartlets, the cake is for the most part served with the dish on which it has been moulded, whereas in France the tourte is independ Taste ent of its mould, and is in effect but the under part of a raised pie. It is best in most cases to bake the tart by itself, and to fill it afterwards. Thus a Vol-au-vent, but for its loose cover, would be a tart in the proper meaning of the word, and it is always prepared apart from its contents. At least it is essential that if the tart and its contents are to be baked together, the latter should have been to some extent cooked beforehand, otherwise they may be underdone while the former is overdone.
With regard to the contents, it is an unheard-of thing in England to put anything into a tart which is not sweet. The French tourte will take any delicate stew-savoury as well as sweet, animal as well as vegetable. If English people would come to understand that tart, the noun, has nothing to do with tart, the adjective, they would then discover that a tart may be as various as a pie, and that there is no difference between the one and the other, save that which arises from the one being open and the other covered. A tart, in short, is but a kind of dinner-plate fit to receive almost any kind of food; but with this distinction that it is a dinner-plate which may be eaten.