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Cherry Kuchen
1 recipe sweet pastry dough 1/2 cup bread crumbs 1 1/2 cups pitted canned cherries sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 cup cream, whipped 1/4 cup powdered sugar Line a deep pie pan with sweet pastry dough. Cover bottom with bread crumbs. Add strained, pitted cherries and sugar sufficient to sweeten. Sprinkle with cinnamon and bake in hot oven (400dg.F.) until brown, for 25 minutes. Heap with whipped cream, sweetened with powdered sugar. This will make one pie.
A single-crust cherry tart from the era of canned fruit, with breadcrumbs doing the thickening. The quantities are workable, though the sugar for the filling is left to the cook's judgement.
- The breadcrumb layer is the pointDry crumbs scattered over the raw pastry absorb the cherry juice and keep the base from going slack. Use plain dry crumbs, not seasoned or panko; about half a cup covers a 9-inch pan.
- Unmeasured sugarThe filling calls only for "sugar sufficient to sweeten." With canned sour cherries drained of their syrup, 1/2 to 2/3 cup is the usual range; with sweet canned cherries, 2 to 3 tablespoons is enough.
- "Strained" means drainedTip the cherries into a sieve and let them sit several minutes. Carrying the canning liquid into an unblind-baked shell is what turns this kind of tart to soup.
- Oven400F is given and is right. Twenty-five minutes browns the crust in a metal or glass pan; a thick ceramic dish will want closer to 35 minutes, and the pastry rim should be set and coloured before you take it out.
- Deep pie panOnly 1 1/2 cups of fruit goes into it, so a standard 9-inch plate suits it better than a true deep-dish pan, which will leave the filling looking sunken.
- The creamOne cup of cream whips to roughly two cups, which is a generous topping for one tart. Add the 1/4 cup powdered sugar near the end of whipping and stop at soft peaks.
- Serve cool, top lateWhipped cream heaped on a warm tart weeps within minutes. Let the kuchen come to room temperature, then top it just before it goes to the table.
- YieldOne pie, six to eight servings.
Kuchen is simply German for cake, and in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century the word came to mean almost any fruit-topped pastry or sweet yeast dough carried over by German-speaking immigrant households, particularly in the Midwest and among Pennsylvania and Texas German communities. The breadcrumb layer under the fruit is a long-established European trick, found in Austrian and German fruit tarts long before canned cherries existed, and it did the work now usually given to cornstarch or tapioca.