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Apple Tart (Quart apples quartered Sugar)
1 quart apples quartered Sugar Pastry Peel and put the apples in a deep pie dish, sprinkle with sugar, cover with a pastry crust, and bake in a quick oven.
A deep-dish apple pie of the plainest English kind: fruit, sugar, a single top crust. The recipe assumes the cook already knows her pastry and her oven, so the working details have to be filled in.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-425F. A practical modern approach is to bake at that heat for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the crust, then drop to about 350F for another 30-40 minutes so the apples cook through without the pastry burning; the recipe itself gives no second stage.
- A quart of applesMeasured as quarters in a quart measure, that is somewhere around 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of whole fruit, or three to four medium apples. It suits a deep dish of roughly quart capacity.
- Sugar, unspecifiedBetween 1/3 and 1/2 cup for this quantity, depending on the fruit. Cooking apples of the Bramley type need the full amount; a sweet dessert apple needs half of it plus a squeeze of lemon.
- Deep dish, one crustThis is a covered pie, not a lined tart shell despite the name. The dish should have a lip the pastry can be pressed onto, and the fruit should mound slightly so the crust does not collapse as the apples shrink.
- Slit the topThe one thing the recipe omits. Cut two or three vents or the steam lifts the crust off the fruit and leaves a hollow dome over a soupy base.
- Juice managementApples throw a good deal of liquid. A tablespoon of flour or cornstarch tossed with the sugar keeps it from running; the recipe itself calls for nothing but sugar.
- PastrySince this is from a meatless cookery book, the crust was likely made with butter or a vegetable shortening rather than lard. Any short crust or rough puff works; chill it before it goes over the fruit.
- YieldFour to six servings. Serve warm rather than hot, with cream.
Covered apple pies of this sort are among the oldest continuously made English sweets. Its appearance in a meatless cookery book may be a reminder of what "meatless" often meant to publishers of the period: not so much a separate cuisine as a reorganisation of the ordinary one, gathering the dishes that happened to contain no flesh so that Lenten and vegetarian households could plan whole menus from a single volume. The word "tart" is used loosely here; in British usage it has covered open and covered fruit pies more or less interchangeably for centuries, and the shallow uncovered tart is a later narrowing of the term.