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Banbury Tarts
Make tarts and fill with the following cooked mixture: mix for filling, one cup seeded and chopped raisins, one cup sugar, three tablespoons cracker crumbs, one egg, one tablespoon butter, one eighth teaspoon salt, juice and rind of one lemon.
The recipe assumes you already know how to make a tart shell and how Banbury tarts are shaped, so most of the work is in the assumptions rather than the words. The filling is a stovetop mixture that must be cooked and cooled before it goes anywhere near pastry.
- Cook the filling first"The following cooked mixture" means the filling is made in a saucepan over low heat until the egg thickens it and the sugar dissolves — a few minutes, stirring constantly, no boiling. Cool it completely; warm filling melts the butter in the pastry and the tarts leak.
- The shape the book takes for grantedBanbury tarts in American cookbooks of this period were often made as turnovers rather than open shells: cut rounds or squares of plain pie pastry, put a spoonful of filling on half, fold over, seal the edges with a fork, and cut a small vent. Egg-wash and sugar the tops if you like. The recipe's "make tarts and fill" does not say which form is meant.
- Cracker crumbsPlain soda crackers, crushed fine — they are a binder and absorb the lemon juice. Fine dry breadcrumbs work; graham crumbs push the sweetness off balance.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" meant the seeds had been removed by hand or by machine, a real chore in 1907. Modern seedless raisins need only chopping, and a rough chop by knife or a few pulses in a processor is enough.
- Rind of one lemonZest only, finely grated, none of the white pith. A microplane does the job in seconds.
- OvenThe book gives none. Bake at 425F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the pastry is browned and the filling bubbles at the vent.
- YieldThe filling makes roughly two cups, enough for about a dozen turnovers depending on how large you cut them and how much pastry you make. It keeps several days covered in the refrigerator.
Banbury tarts take their name from Banbury in Oxfordshire, where a spiced currant-and-peel pastry has been sold since at least the sixteenth century; the English original is an oval turnover of enriched dough, and Gervase Markham printed a version of the cake in the early 1600s. What crossed to American cookbooks was looser: raisins instead of currants, lemon in place of the older mixed spice and rosewater, and cracker crumbs as a cheap binder. Its appearance in Lowney's is a reminder that these tarts were pantry baking — raisins, sugar, one egg, a lemon, and whatever crackers were in the tin — the sort of filled pastry that kept for days in a cake box and traveled well in a lunch pail.<hodgepodge>Note that this cookbook was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a chocolate maker, and the dessert chapter ranges well beyond cocoa into the standard American repertoire of the day.</hodgepodge>