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Apple Tart, Creamed
INGREDIENTS for 1 tart.-2 lbs. of apples, 3 oz. of sugar, a few strips of lemon-peel, puff paste.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 3d.
Make the tart by the preceding recipe, omitting the icing. When it is baked, cut out the middle of the lid or crust, leaving a border all round the dish. Fill up with a nicely-made boiled custard, grate a little nutmeg over the top, and the pie is ready for table. Whipped cream may be substituted for the custard. This tart is usually eaten cold. It is rather an old-fashioned dish; but, at the same time, extremely nice.
TIME. to hour.
SEASONABLE from August to March.
A deep-dish apple pie with the centre of its lid cut away after baking and the hollow filled with custard. The whole trick is in the order of operations: the pastry is baked and cooled before anything wet goes near it.
- "The preceding recipe"This is a variation, not a standalone recipe. The base is Beeton's apple tart: apples peeled, cored and quartered into a deep pie dish with the sugar and lemon peel, and a puff paste lid over the rim rather than a bottom crust. The earlier version is finished with an icing, which this recipe tells you to leave off.
- Oven heatThe original specifies no temperature. Puff paste wants a hot oven at the start to get its lift, then a moderate heat to finish the fruit. The "TIME. to hour" in the original is garbled; the missing fraction cannot be recovered with confidence.
- QuantitiesTwo pounds of apples is about six medium cooking apples once peeled and cored; use a firm cooker such as Bramley or Granny Smith so the fruit holds shape under the lid. Three ounces of sugar is a scant half cup — deliberately restrained, since the custard sweetens the dish.
- Lemon peelStrips means pared zest with no white pith, laid among the apples and fished out before the custard goes in. Nobody wants to meet a strip of boiled peel under a spoonful of custard.
- Boiled custardIn Beeton's usage this is a stirred custard cooked in a pan or over hot water, not a baked one: eggs, milk and sugar taken to the point where it coats the spoon, around 175-180F, then strained and cooled. Take it further and it scrambles.
- Cutting the lidCut the centre out of the baked crust while it is still warm and the pastry is crisp, using the point of a small knife and leaving a border an inch or so wide. Let both tart and custard cool fully before filling, or the pastry border softens and the custard thins.
- NutmegGrate it over at the last moment. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of what makes it worth adding within a few weeks.
- Yield and servingA dish of this size will serve roughly six. Beeton is explicit that it is eaten cold, and a custard-filled tart will not keep, so the custard is best added on the day it is served.
Beeton's own note that this is "rather an old-fashioned dish" is the interesting part: by the 1860s the custard-filled apple tart evidently read as a survival from an earlier style of English pastry, when a deep dish of fruit under a single lid of paste was a standard form. Cutting out the centre of the baked lid and adding the custard afterwards at least avoids trying to bake a custard alongside raw apples. The season of August to March points to a household drawing on stored apples, which before modern controlled-atmosphere storage meant late-keeping varieties held in a cool, airy store and used up before spring.