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Banberries
1 lb. flour Blend well together and then use enough cold water to hold together as pie crust. Roll thin and cut out with cookie cutter. Wet half the edge of each one with water, put in 1 t filling in each and fold over and press edges together. Prick top with a fork.
Filling 2 C finely chopped seeded 2 eggs, well beaten raisins 1 C nuts Rind and juice 2 lemons 2 C granulated sugar 4 soda crackers, rolled fine Mrs. James H. Swan 1 egg
This is a church-supper version of the Banbury tart, and the transcription of the pastry is incomplete — read the notes before you shop.
- The pastry list is defectiveOne pound of flour, one egg and cold water will not make anything you could call a pie crust; the fat has dropped out of the printed list, as has any salt. A standard pastry proportion for 1 lb (about 3 1/2 cups) of flour is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of lard or shortening, and the egg was likely beaten into the water. Treat the crust as your own and use the filling, which is complete.
- "Blend well together"In period pastry instructions this generally means rubbing or cutting the fat into the flour to a coarse-crumb stage before any liquid goes in. The instruction to add "enough cold water to hold together as pie crust" is the whole method: stop at cohesion, not smoothness.
- Abbreviations1 t is one teaspoon of filling per round; C is a cup. Roll thin means about 1/8 inch, and a cookie cutter of 3 to 3 1/2 inches gives a turnover that seals without bursting.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" meant raisins from which the seeds had been removed by hand or machine; the ordinary raisin of the day had pips. Any modern seedless raisin is the direct substitute, and muscats were among the common seeded varieties of the period.
- The soda crackersFour crackers rolled fine are the thickener, standing in for breadcrumbs or flour. They absorb the lemon juice and egg so the filling sets rather than running out at the seams. Four crackers give only about a quarter-cup of fine crumbs; let the mixture stand ten minutes before filling so it firms up.
- Filling proportionsTwo cups of sugar to two cups of raisins is very sweet by current taste, and the recipe leans on the rind and juice of two lemons to cut it. Zest the lemons before juicing, and grate only the yellow.
- No oven givenBanbury turnovers want a hot oven so the pastry sets before the filling boils: 400 to 425F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the edges are pale gold. The fork pricks are not decoration — they vent steam that would otherwise blow the seal.
- YieldThe filling is generous for the pastry and makes roughly three to four dozen small turnovers depending on your cutter; there will be filling left over.
Banbury cakes take their name from the Oxfordshire market town, where an oval pastry of spiced dried fruit has been sold since at least the seventeenth century; the shop trade there is generally traced to a bakery on Parsons Street that made the cakes a coaching-road souvenir. American cookbooks of the nineteenth century adapted the idea into the "Banbury tart" he ralemon and sugar filling folded into a pie crust and baked in batches, which suited a home cook better than the enriched laminated dough of the English original. The odd spelling here, "Banberries," is the kind of drift you find constantly in community cookbooks, where recipes were copied from a neighbour's card rather than a printed book, and it hints that the name had come loose from the place. Its appearance in a church collection is unsurprising: a filling built on raisins, crackers and lemons kept well, travelled well, and could be made in quantity from pantry staples.