Cranberry Tart
1½ cups cranberries 1/2 cup water 3/4 cup sugar Wash the cranberries and cook them with the sugar and water for ten minutes. Line a pie plate with paste; pour in the cranberries when they have cooled; moisten the edges and lay narrow strips of paste across the plate, forming diamond-shaped spaces. Add a rim of paste; press into flutings with the finger and bake in a hot oven.
A plain lattice tart with only three filling ingredients, so the pastry and the set of the fruit are the whole of it. Two lines in the original need translation.
- "Paste" means pastryAny short crust or plain pie dough of the period; no pastry recipe is given with the tart itself, the reader being expected to fall back on a standard one. A single batch for a two-crust pie is more than enough, since the top is only strips.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400-425F in modern terms. Expect something in the region of 25 minutes, until the lattice is browned and the filling bubbles at the edges; if the strips are colouring faster than the bottom crust sets, drop the heat for the last part of the bake.
- The ten-minute cookThat is long enough for the berries to burst and their pectin to release, which is what sets the filling — there is no flour or cornstarch here. Do not push much past it or you have sauce rather than fruit.
- Cool it properlyThe instruction to pour in the cranberries "when they have cooled" is the hinge. Hot filling on raw pastry gives a slack, grey bottom crust, and the mixture also thickens noticeably as it drops to room temperature, which makes it easier to spread level.
- QuantityOne and a half cups of berries is a thin filling. No plate size is given; it will suit a small, shallow pie plate, and for a modern 9-inch plate the quantities want increasing.
- SweetnessThree-quarters of a cup of sugar to a cup and a half of raw cranberries leaves the tart genuinely tart, which is the point of the name. Taste the cooked fruit before it goes into the shell and add more only if you want it closer to a jam.
- YieldPerhaps six modest wedges. Best the day it is baked; the pastry softens overnight under the fruit.
The cranberry is one of the few fruits in a book like this that is wholly North American um Vaccinium macrocarpon, gathered wild from New England bogs long before it was farmed, with commercial cultivation on Cape Cod generally traced to the early nineteenth century. Its very high acidity and pectin content made it a natural for pastry: it needs no thickener and keeps its shape, and barrels of berries travelled and stored well into the winter, which is why cranberry pies and tarts turn up so often in American cookbooks of the eighteen hundreds and after.