French Tart
Roll out puff-paste; cover a pie dish with it; turn and notch the edge; fill the crust with any small preserved fruits, jam or marmalade; cut out an ornament of leaves from the crust; lay it on the top and bake for about half an hour in a quick oven.
An open jam tart with a pastry lattice or leaf decoration, written for a cook who already knows how puff paste behaves. Two things decide whether it works: the thickness of the filling and the heat of the oven.
- "Quick oven"425-450F. Puff paste needs that initial blast to lift the layers before the butter melts out; at 350F it slumps into a greasy biscuit. Half an hour at 425F is about right for a shallow pie dish, dropping to 375F for the last ten minutes if the top colours too fast.
- Puff-paste quantityThe original assumes you have paste on hand. One 14-oz packet of all-butter frozen puff pastry, thawed, lines a 9-inch pie dish and leaves enough for the leaves and edge.
- Filling depth is the hingeJam and marmalade thin and boil as they heat, and a deep layer will bubble over the notched rim and weld the tart to the dish. Spread no more than about a cup, in a layer under half an inch deep, and leave a clear margin at the edge.
- "Turn and notch the edge"Most likely means folding the overhanging paste back on itself to make a raised double rim, then nicking it at intervals with the back of a knife. Read that way, the raised rim does useful work as well as decorative: it helps hold the jam in.
- "Small preserved fruits"Whole preserved cherries, damsons, greengages or apricots in heavy syrup. Drain them well before filling or the syrup will soak the base. A thick-set jam or a marmalade with peel holds its shape best.
- Ornament of leavesCut the leaves from scraps, score veins with a knife tip, and brush with beaten egg or milk. Set them on the jam rather than sealing them across the whole top; this is an open tart, not a covered pie.
- Blind baking the baseThe original bakes it in one go, which is why a thin filling matters. If your jam is very loose, prick and blind-bake the shell at 425F for 12-15 minutes, then fill and finish.
- Yield and servingA 9-inch tart serves six to eight. Cool at least twenty minutes before cutting; hot jam runs, and it is hot enough to burn.
The dish itself is the standard jam tart of nineteenth-century English and American cookery, given a "French" name of the kind period cookbooks often attached to such things. The recipe belongs to the era of the well-stocked preserve closet: a cook who had put up cherries, damsons and marmalade in summer could produce this quickly from the shelf, and its vagueness about the filling is the point rather than a flaw. Short, elastic recipes such as this were written to be adapted to whatever the jars held.