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Treacle Tart
3 tablespoons of golden syrup Paste 2 ounces of bread crumbs 1/2 ounce of butter Make the paste according to the recipe for "Paste, Puff for Tarts and Tartlets," then line a shallow eight-or nine-inch tin with paste. Put in the bread crumbs, which must be very fine. Melt the butter and pour it over the bread crumbs, and warm the golden syrup and pour that evenly over all. Bake in a hot oven for about twenty minutes.
A very short recipe that assumes a cook already has pastry to hand and knows what golden syrup does in a hot oven. The proportions here are lean by modern standards, so watch the balance of crumbs to syrup.
- Oven temperature"A hot oven" is usually glossed as roughly 400-450F (200-230C). At that heat the pastry sets quickly and the syrup caramelises at the edges; twenty minutes is about right, but check at fifteen since sugar goes from amber to bitter fast.
- Golden syrupGolden syrup is a partially inverted cane sugar syrup, thicker and less assertive than molasses. Corn syrup is the wrong flavour and dark treacle or blackstrap molasses is far too bitter for the quantity given; if golden syrup is unavailable, a mild light molasses cut with simple syrup is nearer the mark.
- Three tablespoons is sparingModern treacle tarts of this diameter generally carry a good deal more syrup in proportion to the crumbs. As written the filling is a thin sweet crumb layer rather than a set, chewy one. Increase the syrup if you want the more familiar version.
- The crumbs"Very fine" matters more than it looks. Coarse crumbs sit up and stay dry; fine, slightly stale white breadcrumbs absorb the warm syrup evenly and set into a single layer. Fresh soft bread turns pasty.
- Warm the syrup, do not cook itWarming makes the syrup pourable so it spreads over the crumbs without needing to be worked. It should not be brought near boiling, which starts caramelising it before it reaches the tin.
- Ounces are weights2 ounces of breadcrumbs is about half a cup of fine dry crumbs, or roughly a cup if they are soft and fresh; 1/2 ounce of butter is 1 tablespoon. Use a scale for the crumbs, since their volume varies wildly with texture.
- The pasteThe book sends you to its puff paste for tarts. A short crust or all-butter pie pastry works as well and is easier to handle under a wet filling; blind baking is not called for here, and the shallow tin with a hot oven is what keeps the base from going soggy.
- YieldAn eight- or nine-inch shallow tart cuts into six to eight wedges. Serve warm rather than hot, with cream; the filling is molten straight from the oven.
Treacle tart belongs to the era after cane refining made syrup cheap and widely available in British kitchens, and it is essentially a thrift dish: stale bread, a little butter, and sweetness poured over the top. By this period "treacle" was used loosely of the syrups drained off in sugar refining, from pale to near-black, and the pale grade sold in tins came to dominate domestic baking; some recipes of the period use "treacle" and "golden syrup" more or less interchangeably. The technique, soaking crumbs in a sweet liquid inside pastry, is the same logic behind bread pudding and treacle sponge, all of them ways of turning yesterday's loaf into today's dessert.