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Orange Tart
801. Squeeze, pulp, and boil two Seville oranges till tender, weigh them, and add double the weight of sugar; beat both together to a paste, and then add the juice and pulp of the fruit, and the size of a walnut of fresh butter, and beat all together. Choose a very shallow dish, line it with paste, fill it with the fruit, and cover or cross with bars, according as it is desired to be an open or closed tart. Another.-Line a tart-pan with thin puff paste, put into it orangemarmalade that is made with apple-jelly, and lay across it twisted bars of paste. Bake, and serve when cold.
A bitter-orange curd tart, sweetened at a ratio that looks alarming until you remember Seville oranges are almost inedibly sour. The order of operations is the whole difficulty: the juice and pulp are reserved and go back in only after the boiled peel has been beaten to a paste with the sugar.
- Read the first sentence carefully"Squeeze, pulp, and boil" most likely means juice the oranges and scrape out the pulp first, then boil the emptied peels until a skewer passes through with no resistance — probably an hour or more, and the water may be changed once or twice to draw off harshness. The reserved juice and pulp are stirred in at the end so their flavour is not cooked away.
- Seville orangesThese are the bitter marmalade oranges, in season January to February and rarely stocked otherwise. Frozen Seville pulp or peel is sold for marmalade makers; failing that, use two-thirds ordinary orange peel to one-third grapefruit or lemon peel and cut the sugar by about a quarter.
- Weigh, do not guessThe sugar is double the weight of the boiled fruit; on the reading above, that is the boiled, drained peel. Two medium Sevilles might give in the region of 5 oz of cooked peel, so about 10 oz of sugar. Weigh after boiling and squeezing out water, not before.
- The size of a walnut of butterAbout 1 oz, or two tablespoons. It is there to gloss the filling and soften the sugar, not to enrich it substantially.
- Beating to a pasteA mortar or a food processor both work. The finished filling should be thick enough to hold a spoon mark; if the juice has loosened it too far, cook it down in a pan for a few minutes before filling the shell, or the paste will soak the base.
- A very shallow dishThe instruction is deliberate — this filling is intensely sweet and wants a thin layer. A 9-inch tart tin no more than an inch deep, or a metal pie plate.
- OvenThe original gives none. Bake blind-lined shortcrust or puff at 400F until the pastry is set and coloured, 25-35 minutes depending on which pastry and whether it is latticed or fully covered. The filling needs no cooking, only heating through.
- The second versionThis is the shortcut: marmalade set with apple jelly, which supplies pectin and body so the filling holds under the lattice. Any firm, well-set bitter marmalade will do. The second version is explicitly served cold; the first gives no such direction, though hot, the sugar paste runs.
- YieldA 9-inch tart, eight small slices. Small is the correct portion here.
Bitter oranges reached British kitchens from Spain and Portugal as a winter luxury, and by the eighteenth century one common domestic use was to boil the peel soft and beat it with its own weight or more of sugar — close to the operation that produces marmalade, arrested at the paste stage. Recipes of this kind, in which the sugar is measured against the weight of the fruit rather than by the spoon, sit within confectionery practice, where sugar served as the preservative and the proportions answered to that job rather than to taste. The second, briefer method in this entry dispenses with the long boiling of peel altogether, taking ready-made marmalade instead — though the recipe specifies marmalade made with apple-jelly and does not say whether it is bought or homemade.