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Currant or Apple Tarts
Time to bake, from three-quarters to one hour. Pick currants from their stems, or pare and quarter the apples; put them into pie dish with sugar, line edge of dish with paste, pour in a little water, put on cover, ornament edge of paste in the usual manner, and bake it in a brisk oven.
A one-crust English fruit tart baked in a deep dish, written for cooks who already knew the proportions. The chief thing to settle before starting is what "currants" means here.
- Currants, not currantsThese are fresh red or white currants on the stem, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle. If fresh currants are unavailable, gooseberries or blackcurrants behave the same way; dried fruit will not work in this method.
- Brisk ovenThe recipe gives no temperature. "Brisk" is usually taken to mean a hot oven, somewhere around 400-425F. Start hot so the pastry lid sets and colours; if it is browning well before the fruit has softened, drop the heat.
- Paste"paste" is unspecified; for a dish like this it would most likely be a plain short crust, roughly half fat to flour. Enough for a lid and a rim strip on a 9-inch deep dish works out at about 8 oz flour.
- Lining the edgeThe strip of pastry pressed round the wetted rim of the dish is what the lid seals to. Damp it before laying the cover on, or the crust lifts off in one piece as the filling boils.
- Sugar, unspecifiedThe original gives no quantity. Currants need a great deal: 6-8 oz sugar per pound of fruit. Apples take far less, 3-4 oz per pound, depending on the variety.
- The little waterTwo or three tablespoons, no more. Currants release plenty of juice on their own; apples need the small amount to start them steaming under the lid.
- A ventThe recipe does not call for one, but a slit or a pie funnel in the centre helps; steam trapped under a sealed lid can lift or soften the crust.
- Time and yieldThree-quarters to an hour holds up: the fruit must actually soften, not just heat through. A 9-inch dish will serve about six; tarts of this kind were served warm or cold, commonly with cream or custard.
In nineteenth-century English usage a "tart" of this kind was a deep dish of fruit under a pastry lid, with no crust beneath — what an American reader would call a deep-dish pie, and what a pastry cook would distinguish from an open flan. Redcurrants were a staple of kitchen gardens and appear constantly in Victorian and Edwardian household books, in tarts, jellies and summer puddings; they crop heavily, ripen all at once, and are sharp eaten raw. Apples serve as the alternative later in the year, which is presumably why the two are given together here: the method is the same, only the fruit changes.