Plum Tart
INGREDIENTS for tart for 6 persons. lb. of good short crust, 1 1/2 pint of plums, lb. of moist sugar. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Line the edges of a deep tart-dish with crust; fill the dish with plums, and place a small cup or jar, upside down, in the midst of them. Put in the sugar, cover the pie with crust, ornament the edges, and bake in a good oven from to hour. When puff-crust is preferred to short crust, use that made by the given recipe, and glaze PLUM TART. the top by orushing it over with the white of an egg, beaten to a stiff froth with a knife; sprinkle over a little sifted sugar, and put the pie in the oven to set the glaze.
TIME. to hour.
SEASONABLE, with various kinds of plums, from the beginning of August to the beginning of October. Plums, French, Stewed. (A Dessert dish.) - INGREDIENTS-1½ lb. of French plums, pint of syrup, 1 glass of port wine, the rind and juice of 1 lemon. AVERAGE CosT, 1s. 8d.
Stew the plums gently in water for 1 1/2 hour; strain the water, and with it make the syrup. When it is clear, put in the plums with the port wine, lemon-juice and rind, and simmer very gently for 1 hour. Arrange the plums on a glass dish, take out the lemon-rind, pour the syrup over the plums, and, when cold, they will be ready for table.
PLUMS, TO PRESERVE.
A little allspice stewed with the fruit is by many persons considered an improvement.
TIME.-1 hour to stew the plums in water, 1½ hour in the syrup.
SEASONABLE in winter.
A straightforward deep-dish fruit pie with a single top crust. The quantities in this copy have lost their fractions, so treat the weights as guides rather than instructions.
- The inverted cupThe small cup or jar set face down among the plums does the job later given to a pie funnel: it holds the pastry lid up as the fruit collapses beneath it. An egg cup or a modern ceramic pie bird can be used the same way.
- Ambiguous quantitiesBoth the pastry and the sugar weights have lost their fractions here. Enough shortcrust for a single lid and a rim strip, and sugar judged against the sharpness of the fruit, are all that can be said: the original figures cannot be recovered from the text as printed.
- "Moist sugar"Victorian moist sugar was an unrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar, damp and slightly sticky. Light brown soft sugar is the closest modern equivalent; plain granulated works but gives a cleaner, less caramel flavour.
- A pint of plumsFruit measured by volume, not weight. A pint measure of halved and stoned plums is roughly 1 lb. Freestone varieties such as Victorias halve easily; clingstone types are best quartered off the stone.
- "A good oven"No temperature is given anywhere in the book; the phrase is relative. A hot oven, around 400F (200C), is the usual modern reading, dropped to about 350F if the top browns before the fruit is soft.
- Only the edges are linedThe dish is not pastry-lined underneath. Pastry is pressed onto the rim of the dish, dampened, and the lid laid over it, which means a deep dish with a rim wide enough to take the strip.
- The glazeEgg white whisked to a froth, brushed on and dusted with sifted sugar, then returned briefly to the oven, gives a crisp frosted finish rather than the glossy brown of an egg-yolk wash. It sets in a few minutes and burns quickly, so watch it.
- Yield and servingSix servings, as stated. Serve warm rather than hot so the juices thicken slightly, with cream or a plain custard.
Plum tarts belong to the short, glutted end of the English fruit year that Mrs Beeton marks precisely here: the beginning of August to the beginning of October, when the various plums came in and had to be eaten, bottled or preserved. The dish is a deep-dish pie in the old English sense, where a single sheet of pastry covers fruit heaped in a raised china dish, quite unlike the open pastry-lined tart the word suggests today. The inverted cup does the work later given to the moulded ceramic pie funnels and pie birds sold for the purpose, most of which are a twentieth-century article rather than a Victorian one. The average cost of one shilling, printed as a matter of course beside the ingredients, is a reminder that Beeton's book was addressed to a mistress of the house managing a budget as much as to whoever actually rolled the pastry.