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Mixed Apple and Orange Tart
795. Pare two Seville or China oranges thin, boil the peel till tender, and shred it fine; pare, quarter, and core ten apples; put them in a stewpan with as little water as possible; when half done, add half a pound of sugar, the orange-peel, and juice; boil till pretty thick. When cold, put it in a shallow dish with paste round, or patty pans lined with paste, to turn out, and be eaten cold.
A stovetop apple marmalade sharpened with orange, spooned cold into pastry. The pastry work is left to the cook, so the decisions about baking are yours to make.
- The hingeThe filling must be reduced until it mounds on the spoon and a track drawn through the pan stays open for a moment. Underboiled, it weeps into the pastry and the tart collapses when turned out.
- Seville or China orangesA Seville is the bitter marmalade orange, in season only from late winter; a "China orange" is the ordinary sweet orange. Two Sevilles give a much sharper result — with sweet oranges, add a squeeze of lemon.
- Pare thin"Pare thin" means take only the coloured zest with no white pith, which is where the harsh bitterness sits. Boil the peel in two or three changes of water, 20 to 30 minutes in all, until a strip is soft enough to cut with a fingernail.
- Ten applesRoughly 3 lb before peeling and coring. A firm cooking apple such as Bramley breaks down to a purée; a dessert apple holds its shape and gives a chunkier filling.
- Half a pound of sugarAbout 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar. That is a modest amount against 3 lb of apple, so taste before the sugar goes in fully — sharp apples may want a little more.
- As little water as possibleTwo or three tablespoons in a heavy pan over low heat, lid on for the first ten minutes. Any more and you spend a long time boiling it back out again.
- Paste and oven"Paste" is not specified; a short crust is the likeliest reading. Since the filling goes in cold and the tart is eaten cold, the shell or the lined patty pans will need to be baked before filling — the book gives no oven temperature, so use your usual blind-baking heat and bake until the base is dry and coloured. Patty pans are small tartlet tins.
- YieldEnough for one 9-inch shallow tart or about twelve tartlets, with a little filling left over. Refrigerated, the filling should keep a few days.
This comes from The British Cookery Book (1859), compiled under the editorship of J. H. Walsh from contributed and collected receipts, at a period when the boundary between preserve and tart filling was thin — the apple-and-orange mixture here is essentially a marmalade boiled thick and then housed in pastry. The two oranges named tell you something about the Victorian market: the Seville, bitter and thick-skinned, arrived from Spain in winter and was valued for peel and acidity, while the "China orange" was the sweet eating orange, a name that persisted long after the fruit itself was arriving from Portugal, the Azores and the Mediterranean rather than from China. Apples were the year-round bulk and cheap in autumn; a few oranges' worth of peel and juice was the economical way to lift a plain apple filling into something worth serving cold at the end of a meal.