Torto Frutas
Line the sides of a baking dish with a half puff-paste; cover the bottom with sliced pineapple; put in a layer of peeled sliced oranges, then sliced bananas and then a few slices of lemon; sifting a generous supply of powdered sugar over each layer. Repeat the layers until the dish is full and cover with chopped nuts and narrow strips of the puff-paste. Bake slowly for an hour or more.
A layered fruit tart of the sort that turns up in early twentieth-century American books under vaguely Spanish or Portuguese names. The instructions assume you know how much sugar "generous" means and how to keep an hour of baking fruit from flooding the pastry.
- Slow ovenThe recipe says only "bake slowly"; somewhere around 300F is a reasonable modern reading. The long, low heat softens the pineapple and drives off juice without scorching the sugar or over-browning the strips of paste.
- Half puff-pasteIn period usage this means a lesser puff paste, made with less butter and fewer turns than full puff; rough puff is the nearest modern equivalent. A block of store-bought puff pastry, rolled slightly thinner than usual, stands in without complaint.
- The hinge: manage the juiceFour kinds of raw fruit plus sugar will release a great deal of liquid over an hour. Note that the paste lines only the sides: the bottom of the dish is covered with pineapple, not pastry. Drain the pineapple well, blot the orange and banana slices, and dust each layer with a spoonful of cornstarch or fine cake crumbs along with the sugar, or the whole thing will be swimming.
- Lemon in moderation"a few slices" is all the recipe asks, and it means a few. They are there for acid against all that sugar; cut them thin, and go easy, since peel and pith in quantity will turn the dish bitter.
- Powdered sugarIn this period powdered sugar usually meant finely ground granulated rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Either works here; reckon on about 2 tablespoons per layer, less over the pineapple, more over the bananas.
- Dish and quantityA deep 9-inch pie dish or a 2-quart baking dish filled with layers takes roughly one small pineapple, three oranges, three bananas, one lemon and a cup of chopped nuts — walnuts or almonds suit it. Serves eight.
- BananasUse fruit that is ripe but still firm. Spotted, soft bananas dissolve completely over an hour at 300F and the layer disappears into syrup.
- ServingLet it stand at least half an hour out of the oven. Hot from the dish the juices run; warm, they have thickened enough to cut. Cream or a plain custard sauce would not be out of place.
The name is a piece of loose cookbook Spanish — torto and frutas (fruits) — of a kind that made a dish worth putting on a company table when a foreign-sounding title was wanted. The recipe itself is less Iberian than it is a product of improved transport and importing: pineapple, oranges and bananas together in one dish, in quantity, was a genuinely new possibility for the ordinary American household only from the late nineteenth century onward.