Apricot Tart
INGREDIENTS for 1 tart.-Sufficient apricots to fill a pie-dish, sugar to taste, puff-paste or short crust.
AVERAGE COST, in season, 1s. 3d.
Break the apricots in half, take out the stones, and put them into a pie-dish, in the centre of which place a very ery small cup or jar, bottom uppermost; sweeten with good moist sugar, but add no water. Line the edge of the dish with paste, put on the cover. Bake from 1/2 to 3/4 hour, according to size; and if puff paste is used, glaze it about 10 minutes before the pie is done, and put it into the oven again to set the APRICOTS, FLANC OF. glaze. Short crust merely requires a little sifted sugar sprinkled over it before being sent to table. Green apricots make very good tarts, but they should be boiled with a little sugar and water before they are covered with the crust.
TIME. to hour.
SEASONABLE in August, September, and October; green ones rather earlier.
A Victorian single-crust fruit pie in the English manner: fruit heaped into a deep dish, pastry over the top only, and no thickener at all. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- The upturned cupThe small cup or jar set bottom-up in the centre is a pie funnel in everything but name. It holds the pastry lid clear of the sinking fruit and gives the steam somewhere to go, which is why the crust does not collapse into the juice. A ceramic pie bird or a small ovenproof ramekin does the same work.
- No water is deliberateApricots throw a great deal of juice as they cook, and adding liquid produces a soupy filling under a soggy lid. This is the hinge of the recipe: resist the instinct to add anything wet.
- QuantitiesBeeton gives none beyond "sufficient apricots to fill a pie-dish" and "sugar to taste." A deep dish of the kind implied would take roughly 1.5 to 2 lb of apricots and 3 to 4 oz of sugar, serving perhaps four to six.
- "Good moist sugar"Moist sugar was an unrefined or partly refined soft sugar, closest today to light soft brown sugar. Caster sugar works and gives a cleaner flavour; the brown gives a slight caramel note that suits apricots well.
- Oven heatBeeton gives none. Start at 425F for 15 minutes to set and lift the pastry, then drop to 350F for the remainder. The half to three-quarters of an hour is realistic for a deep dish of raw fruit.
- Glazing puff pasteThe glaze meant here is most likely beaten egg white brushed over the pastry and dusted with sifted sugar, returned to the oven only long enough to set to a crisp sheen. The recipe's ten minutes at the tail end of baking is about right; much longer and the sugar risks scorching.
- Only the edge is lined"Line the edge of the dish with paste" means a strip of pastry pressed round the rim, which the lid is then sealed onto. There is no base crust, so a shallow tart tin will not do; use a deep dish with a proper lip.
- Green apricotsThese are unripe fruit, hard and sharply acid, and were used before the crop came in properly. They must be stewed with sugar and a little water first, as the recipe says, or they stay stony. Ripe fruit needs no such treatment.
- The stonesDiscard them. Apricot kernels were sometimes cracked and added to Victorian preserves for almond flavour, but they contain amygdalin and are not worth the risk here; a drop of almond extract does the same job.
The English fruit tart of this kind — deep dish, fruit, sugar, lid — is the plainest form of a very old domestic pie, and Beeton's book is full of them, one for nearly every fruit in the calendar, differing mainly in whether water is added and whether the fruit is pre-cooked. Apricots are generally said to have reached English gardens in the sixteenth century and were long a wall-fruit, trained against warm brick in kitchen gardens, which fits the seasonable note giving August to October rather than the year-round supply of imported fruit we have now. The listed cost of 1s 3d is higher than that of the same book's plainer apple and rhubarb tarts, placing this among the less everyday dishes. Green apricots may have included thinnings from the tree, picked to let the remaining fruit swell, though the recipe itself says nothing of their origin.