Apple Tarts
5 apples 1/2 cup cold water 3 eggs 1 lemon 3/4 cup granulated sugar 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons powdered sugar Pare, core and cut up tart apples and cook them in the water until soft, stewing them very slowly. Beat this sauce smooth, partly cool, then add beaten egg-yolks, lemon-juice and grated rind and the granulated sugar, increasing the amount of sugar, if desired. Line patty-pans with paste, fill them with the mixture, dot with butter and bake in a very hot oven. Beat the whites of the eggs stiff, add the powdered sugar, spread on top of the tarts and return to the oven to brown. This amount makes six to eight tarts.
A tartlet of stewed apple thickened with egg yolks and sharpened with lemon, finished with meringue. The instructions assume you know how to line a tin with pastry and how a coal range behaves, so the useful work is in the numbers.
- Cool the apple before the yolks go inThis is the hinge. The stewed apple must be no more than warm to the touch, or the yolks set in threads and the filling turns grainy. Beat the sauce smooth, let it sit off the heat until it stops steaming, then stir the yolks in.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet tins, or a standard 12-cup muffin tin used six to eight cups at a time. The pastry is pressed in as a shell only, with no top crust.
- PastePlain short pastry; pastry for a single 9-inch crust should be roughly enough to line six to eight patty-pans. The recipe itself gives no quantity.
- "A very hot oven"Roughly 450 to 500F by the usual period conversions. The heat sets the pastry edge quickly, which matters with a wet filling; check at 15 minutes and pull the tarts when the crust is coloured and the centre barely trembles.
- Browning the meringueThe recipe returns the topped tarts to the same hot oven for a quick browning. If you would rather not risk scorching, a moderate oven of about 350F for 10 to 15 minutes browns more gently.
- Powdered sugarSugar ground finer than granulated; modern confectioners' sugar is the nearest equivalent. Two tablespoons for three whites is a very lean meringue by present standards, closer to a soft foam than a stiff, glossy cap; two tablespoons per white gives the familiar texture.
- Tart applesThe recipe depends on real acidity. Granny Smith, Bramley or Rhode Island Greening; a modern sweet dessert apple such as Gala will need the lemon juice increased and the sugar cut back.
- YieldSix to eight tarts, as stated, each a single generous serving. They are best the day they are made, as the meringue softens against the wet filling overnight.
New Delineator Recipes collected material from The Delineator, the Butterick pattern company's household magazine. A tart like this one sits between two older traditions: the English apple curd, in which stewed fruit is enriched with eggs, butter and lemon until it behaves like a custard, and the meringue-topped lemon tart familiar from nineteenth-century American pastry. Making both filling and topping from the same three eggs is thrift rather than flourish, and the pairing of a yolk-set filling with a white-based meringue turns up in other recipes of the period. Baking in patty-pans rather than one large tin suits individual portions for tea and supper tables.