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Raspberry and Currant, and Black Currant Tarts
797. These are all made by placing the respective fruits in a pie-dish, with about two large table-spoonsful of brown sugar to a small piedish, and two or three table-spoonsful of water; then cover with any of the pastes described before, and bake.
A bare-bones instruction of the kind Victorian books gave for a dish every cook already knew: fruit, sugar, a splash of water, a lid of pastry. The only real decisions are sugar quantity and oven heat, neither of which the original states in terms we now use.
- What "a small pie-dish" meansRead it as a shallow oval or round dish of about 1 to 1.5 pints, holding roughly 1 lb of fruit. Two large tablespoons of sugar to that quantity is modest by modern taste, especially with red currants or black currants; 3 to 4 tablespoons suits most palates, and raspberries alone need less than currants.
- Brown sugarVictorian "brown sugar" was an unrefined or partly refined moist sugar, closer to today's light muscovado than to the soft brown sold as a baking sugar. Light brown sugar or caster sugar both work; dark muscovado will bully the fruit.
- The waterTwo or three tablespoons seems little, but currants and raspberries release a great deal of juice as they heat. Any more and the filling floods the pastry. Cut it back to one tablespoon if the fruit is very ripe or has been frozen.
- "Any of the pastes described before"Books of this kind typically give a plain shortcrust, a suet or lard paste, and a puff paste; check whichever pastes the book has already set out. For a covered fruit tart of this sort, shortcrust or puff are the sensible choices. About 8 oz of pastry covers a small dish with a little over for a rim strip.
- Oven heatBake at 400-425F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then drop to 350F for a further 20 to 25 minutes so the fruit cooks through. The tart is done when juice bubbles at the vent.
- Vent and rimCut a slit or small hole in the lid. Sealed pastry over wet fruit steams from beneath and lifts away from the filling. A strip of pastry pressed round the wetted lip of the dish gives the lid something to grip.
- Preparing the fruitCurrants must be stripped from their stalks -- run a fork down each string. Black currants are sharper and tougher-skinned than red and benefit from the higher end of the sugar range; raspberries need no preparation beyond a look-over.
- Yield and servingA small dish serves four. Serve warm rather than hot, with pouring cream or a thin custard, both of which the period would have taken for granted.
Covered fruit tarts like this are the plainest fixture of the English pudding course, and the pairing of raspberry with red currant is an old one made on practical grounds: the two ripen together in a British garden, and the currant's acidity and natural pectin give body and edge to raspberries that would otherwise cook down to sweet mush. Black currants, stronger and more astringent, were long valued as much for their supposed usefulness against sore throats as for their flavour. That this entry runs to a single sentence, and refers the cook back to the pastes given earlier, tells you a good deal about how such books worked: the pastry was the skill worth writing down, while the filling was assumed to be whatever the garden or the market had that week.