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Currant and Raspberry Tart, Red
INGREDIENTS for tart for 6 persons.-1½ pint of picked currants, pint of raspberries, 3 heaped tablespoonfuls of moist sugar, 1/2 lb. of short crust. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Strip the currants from the stalks, and put them into a deep pie-dish, with a small cup placed in the midst, bottom upwards; add the raspberries and sugar; place border of paste round the edge of the dish, cover with crust, ornament the edges, and bake from to hour; strew some sifted sugar over before being sent to table. This tart is more generally served cold than hot.
TIME. to hour.
SEASONABLE in June, July and Augus Note. In tarts of this description carefully avoid washing the fruit.
CURRANT DUMPLINGS.
A plain deep-dish fruit pie of the sort English households made all through midsummer, with one structural trick that is easy to miss. The measurements are by volume in the old style, and the printed timings have dropped out of the text.
- The upturned cupThe small cup set bottom upwards in the middle of the dish holds the pastry lid clear of the collapsing fruit and catches some of the juice. An inverted egg cup or a ceramic pie funnel will stand in for it.
- The double pastry edgeThe "border of paste round the edge of the dish" is a separate strip of short crust pressed onto the dampened rim before the lid goes on. It gives the top something to grip as the filling shrinks, and stops the crust sliding into the juice.
- Fruit by volumeA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz. Reckon on roughly 1 lb of redcurrants and about 10 oz of raspberries, though the fruit's size makes any conversion approximate.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined soft sugar, closest today to light brown soft sugar. Three heaped tablespoons is modest for this much currant; taste the fruit and add more if it is sharp.
- Oven and timeThe durations have dropped out of the text in both places, in the ingredient list and in the TIME line. The recipe gives no oven temperature or heat description of any kind, so any modern figure is the editor's suggestion rather than the book's: a fairly hot oven, easing back once the pastry has set, until the crust is coloured and the juice bubbles.
- On not washing the fruitThe note reflects a period when currants came straight from the garden and wet fruit made a sodden crust. Supermarket berries should be rinsed and then dried thoroughly on a cloth, which achieves the same end.
- ServingServes six. The recipe calls for sifted sugar strewn over before it goes to table; serve with cream or a plain custard. It notes only that the tart is more generally served cold than hot.
Redcurrants and raspberries ripen together in an English garden, and the pairing is a long-established one in British fruit cookery, the currants supplying acidity and pectin that the softer, sweeter raspberry lacks. The apparatus of ingredients, average cost, time and season is strongly characteristic of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management and the abridged cookery volumes drawn from it, though the page as given does not identify itself; such books are organised around this kind of seasonal thrift, which is why the entry carries a "seasonable" line at all: before reliable imports, fresh raspberries in December were out of the question, whatever could be done with bottled and preserved fruit. The average cost of one shilling, given here as it is for nearly every recipe in the book, was one of the innovations that made such work so useful to a mistress of a household budgeting by the week. The stray heading "CURRANT DUMPLINGS" at the end is the catchword for the next entry, left behind by the scanning of the page.