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Cherry Tarts
Line a deep pie dish with plain paste. Pick over 1 1/2 pounds cherries. Turn a cup upsidedown in the middle. Fill around it with the fruit. Add sugar to taste. Lay a wide strip of plain paste around the edge of the dish. Cover and press the edges firmly together with a pastry jagger. Bake in hot oven 25 minutes and serve with powdered sugar, sprinkled thickly on top. All juicy fruits are excellent cooked in the same way.
A deep-dish covered fruit tart in the English style, built on two structural tricks that a modern cook may not recognise: the inverted cup and the pastry band around the rim.
- The inverted cupAn ordinary teacup or small custard cup, turned upside down in the centre, holds the top crust up and off the fruit and gives the juice somewhere to gather. A ceramic pie bird or funnel serves much the same supporting purpose (though it also vents steam, which the cup does not); leave the cup in place through baking and serving.
- The pastry band is not decorationDampen the rim of the dish, press on the wide strip of paste, then moisten that strip before laying the lid. This gives the lid something to grip and helps keep the tart sealed as the juices rise.
- "Plain paste"An unsweetened shortcrust — flour, cold fat, salt, ice water. The sugar in this dish is all inside the fruit and on top.
- Hot ovenRead this loosely as somewhere around 400-450F. Twenty-five minutes at that heat suits the top crust, but the fruit below may still be firm in a deep dish; if the juices are not bubbling at the seam, drop the heat and give it another 10-15 minutes.
- Pastry jaggerA fluted pastry wheel. The crimped edge it leaves is a seal as much as an ornament; the tines of a fork pressed all round will serve.
- Cherries and sugar1 1/2 lb is weight before pitting, roughly 4 cups pitted. Sour cherries want about 3/4 cup sugar plus a tablespoon of flour or cornstarch to thicken the juice; sweet cherries need half that sugar and a squeeze of lemon.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match, though confectioners' sugar will not spoil it.
- YieldServes about six. The tart is best warm; the crust softens once it has stood a day.
The word tart here carries its older English sense of a fruit pie baked in a deep dish, not the shallow open pastry the word now suggests in American usage. The inverted cup is an old kitchen expedient of the same kind as the ceramic pie birds still sold today; its purpose is to keep the lid from collapsing onto the fruit as the filling cooks down and to give the juice somewhere to gather. The recipe closes with "all juicy fruits are excellent cooked in the same way" — a single method expected to carry a cook through whatever the season offers, cherries in early summer, then currants, plums and damsons as they come in.