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Bethlehem Apple Tart
Pare, core and slice juicy tart apples. Line a pie plate with half puff-paste; put in layers of apples and sugar until the dish is very full; add a little water; drop small pieces of butter over the
A plain double-crust apple tart built in a pie plate, with the fruit sugared in layers rather than tossed in a bowl. A few of the period's assumptions need translating.
- Puff-pasteIn a book of this vintage "puff-paste" covers a range of home-made buttered, folded pastes rather than one fixed formula. All-butter frozen puff pastry, thawed and rolled a little thinner than it comes, works here; standard pie dough gives a sturdier, less flaky tart.
- Apples"Juicy tart apples" means a firm cooking apple: Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening. Sweet dessert apples turn to sauce and make the sugar cloying.
- Sugar quantityNo amount is given. For a 9-inch plate, 1/2 to 3/4 cup total, scattered between the layers, suits a genuinely tart apple.
- "Very full"Apples shrink appreciably as they cook, so heap the fruit above the rim before the top crust goes on.
- The little waterTwo tablespoons is enough. Its job is to start the apples steaming before the sugar draws out their own juice; more than that and the bottom crust turns to paste.
- OvenBake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and lift the pastry, then drop to 350F for 35 to 45 minutes, until juice bubbles thickly at the vent and a skewer meets no resistance in the fruit. Puff pastry needs that initial heat.
- YieldOne 9-inch tart, six to eight servings. Let it stand at least 30 minutes before cutting so the juices set.
Apple tarts of this construction — pastry below, sugared raw fruit heaped in, pastry above — are among the oldest continuously made English and American sweets, and they survived into printed cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost unchanged. The "Bethlehem" name most likely points to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a Moravian settlement; such place-names attached themselves freely to recipes in this period without implying any documented origin.