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Raspberry Tart with Cream
800. Roll out some thin puff paste, and lay it in a patty-pan of what size you choose. Put in raspberries, strew over them fine sugar, cover with a thin lid, and then bake. Cut it open, and have ready the following mixture warm:-Half a pint of cream, the yolks of two or three eggs well beaten, and a little sugar; and, when this is added to the tart, return it to the oven for five or six minutes.
A Victorian raspberry tart finished the old way: baked closed, opened, filled with warm custard, then briefly returned to the oven. The custard is the part that needs attention.
- Half a pint of creamThis book uses imperial measure, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. Single or light cream behaves best here; double or heavy cream with three yolks will set very firm.
- Patty-panA shallow round baking tin; sizes varied a good deal, and the recipe leaves the choice open ('of what size you choose'). Any tin that lets you lay a bottom crust and a flat lid over the fruit will do.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. Puff paste generally wants a hot oven, in modern terms something like 400-425F, to lift and set the layers; for the brief return with the custard a moderate oven, around 325-350F, is safer, as high heat will curdle the eggs at the edges.
- Warm the custard properly"Have ready the following mixture warm" is doing more work than it appears. Whisk cream, yolks and sugar over low heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens to coat a spoon (around 175F). Five or six minutes in the oven will not cook a raw custard through.
- Cut it openThis means slicing the baked lid free and lifting it off, pouring the custard over the fruit, then setting the lid back on. Do it while the tart is still hot so the pastry does not shatter.
- Raspberries and sugarAbout 1 lb of berries and 2-4 tablespoons sugar suits an 8-inch tart, depending on the fruit. A teaspoon of cornflour tossed with the berries keeps the juice from flooding the base, which the original does not address.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. It is best barely warm or at room temperature, when the custard has set but the pastry has not gone soft.
Closed fruit tarts "cut open" and enriched with a cream-and-yolk mixture were a standing device in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English pastry; the tart was baked as a lidded pie, then opened to receive the custard so the eggs never met the full heat of the pastry oven. Raspberries were a garden and hedgerow fruit with a short summer season and little keeping quality, and they turn up in tarts, creams and vinegars as well as preserves. The British Cookery Book, edited by J. H. Walsh and published in the 1850s, gathered contributions from correspondents across the country, and its numbered entries are characteristically terse: an experienced cook of the period was expected to know what "thin puff paste" and "a patty-pan of what size you choose" implied without being told.