Apple Tarts
Fill tarts with Apple Sauce to which has been added one tablespoon butter.
This is a cross-reference recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century books: it assumes you have already made pastry and apple sauce elsewhere in the volume, and only tells you the one thing that distinguishes the tart. Everything you need to supply is below.
- What "tarts" means hereProbably individual shells rather than one large open tart, though the recipe does not say. The book gives no pastry method, tin size, or oven heat here, so any figures are the modern cook's own: line the tins, prick the bases, weight them, and bake blind until dry and pale gold before filling.
- Bake the shells emptyThe filling is already cooked, so the pastry gets no help from a second baking. A shell that goes in soft will stay soft under wet apple. Cool the shells fully before filling or the steam softens them from beneath.
- The apple sauceA thick sauce works best in pastry; a loose modern jarred sauce will soak the shell. Cook peeled tart apples with very little water, sweeten to taste, and reduce until stiff.
- The butterThe recipe does not say how much sauce the tablespoon is for; it most likely means per batch of sauce rather than per tart, but this is a guess. Beat it in while the sauce is hot; it enriches the filling and gives it gloss.
- ServingFilled pastry softens as it stands, so fill them as close to serving as you can manage.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like a number of manufacturer cookbooks of the period it doubles as a general household manual, with the maker's product prominent in the candy and dessert chapters. The extreme brevity here reflects a book written to be read across its own entries: pastry and apple sauce each had their own recipe and were not repeated. "Tart" in American books of this era often meant a small individual pastry, closer to the English tartlet than to the large open fruit tarts sold under that name today.