Banbury Tarts
1 cup raisins 1 cup sugar Juice and grated rind 1 lemon 1 egg 1 cracker TONE and chop raisins, add sugar, egg slightly beaten, cracker finely rolled, and lemon juice and rind.
A filling recipe rather than a full pastry lesson: Farmer assumes you already have puff paste on hand and know the Banbury shape. A few of her assumptions no longer hold.
- Stoning the raisinsRaisins of the period were commonly sold still containing their seeds, and "stone and chop" meant picking each one open. Modern seedless raisins skip that step entirely; simply chop them coarsely, or pulse briefly in a food processor.
- "1 cracker"A plain unsweetened soda or water cracker, rolled to fine crumbs — a tablespoon or two, depending on the cracker. It is a binder, absorbing the lemon juice and egg so the filling does not run out of the pastry. Dry unseasoned breadcrumbs work the same way.
- The filling is uncookedUnlike mincemeat, this mixture goes into the pastry raw and cooks through in the oven. Best mixed shortly before filling; a wet mixture of sugar, juice and egg may loosen on standing.
- Pastry and shapeThe recipe gives the filling only. Banbury tarts are generally made from puff paste or its trimmings, cut in squares or oblongs of about 3 inches, filled, folded over and sealed with a fork or a wet finger. A small vent in the top lets steam escape rather than bursting a seam.
- OvenThe recipe as printed gives no baking instruction at all. Puff paste generally wants a hot oven — around 425F — for 15 to 20 minutes, until the pastry is well risen and browned. A cooler oven melts the butter out before the layers set.
- LemonGrate the rind before juicing, and take only the yellow zest. The pith is bitter and there is nothing in this filling to hide it.
- YieldEnough filling for roughly a dozen small tarts, depending on how generously you fill them. Overfilled tarts leak sugar syrup, which burns onto the pan; line it with parchment.
Banbury tarts take their name from Banbury in Oxfordshire, where a spiced, currant-filled pastry has been sold since at least the seventeenth century and is still made as the flat, oval Banbury cake. The American version had drifted a long way from its ancestor: raisins in place of currants, lemon in place of the older mixture of warm spices and rose water, and a cracker crumb standing in for the older cooked-and-thickened fillings. It belongs to a family of turn-of-the-century "tarts" that were really small hand pies, made from puff paste and stored pantry fruit rather than fresh fruit in season.