Apple Tarts
5 apples
¾ cup granulated sugar
½ cup cold water
2 tablespoons butter
3 eggs
2 tablespoons powdered sugar
I lemon
Pare, core and cut up tart apples and cook them in the water until soft, stewing them very slowly. Beat this sauce smooth, partly cool, then add beaten egg-yolks, lemon-juice and grated rind and the granulated sugar, increasing the amount of sugar, if desired. Line patty-pans with paste, fill them with the mixture, dot with butter and bake in a very hot oven. Beat the whites of the eggs stiff, add the powdered sugar, spread on top of the tarts and return to the oven to brown. This amount makes six to eight tarts.
A meringue-topped apple curd baked in individual pastry shells. The filling is essentially a lemon-apple custard, so the temperature at which the yolks go in is the thing that decides whether it works.
- Cool the apple before the yolks"Partly cool" is the hinge. Beaten yolks stirred into apple straight off the heat will scramble into threads. Let the puree drop to about 120F, then whisk the yolks in off the heat.
- Patty-pansShallow individual tins, roughly the size of a modern muffin cup or a 3-inch tartlet mould. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; line six to eight cups and leave the rest empty.
- "Paste"Period shorthand for pastry — here a plain short crust or the book's own pie paste. Roll thin, about 1/8 inch, and chill the lined tins before filling.
- "A very hot oven"Somewhere around 450F; period usage of the term varies. That suits the pastry but is hard on an egg filling; bake at the high heat until the crust sets and colours, then drop to 350F to finish the centre without souffleing it.
- Browning the meringueReturn the tarts to a 350F oven for 10-15 minutes to set and colour the whites. A 450F oven will brown the peaks in a minute while leaving the meringue raw and weeping underneath.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Either will make the meringue; superfine dissolves best.
- Tart applesThe recipe asks for tart fruit and means it, since the filling already carries three-quarters of a cup of sugar plus lemon. Granny Smith, Bramley or Rhode Island Greening; a sweet modern eating apple gives a flat, cloying curd.
- Water and stewingHalf a cup for five apples is barely more than enough to keep them from catching. Keep the heat very low, as instructed, and stir now and then; covering the pan helps, though the recipe does not say to.
- YieldSix to eight tarts, as stated. Best eaten the day they are baked — the meringue weeps and the crust softens overnight.
Small apple tarts finished with a meringue lid sit at the meeting point of two older English forms: the medieval apple "tart" of sweetened, spiced fruit in a coffin of pastry, and the older tradition of whipped-and-baked egg whites, recorded in English cookery as "snow" and related dishes, which by the nineteenth century was one familiar way to finish an acid, yolk-thickened filling. The filling here may best be understood as lemon curd stretched with apple — plausibly a thrifty move, since apples were cheap and plentiful and lemons were not. The recipe's assumptions show in what it does not explain: a range hot enough to be called "very hot," a set of patty-pans already in the cupboard, and no need to say what "paste" meant.