Home › Pastry, Pies and Tarts › Apple Tarts
Apple Tarts
Take five apples; three eggs; one lemon (juice and rind); one-fourth cup of butter; three-fourths cup of sugar; one-half cup of water. Peel and core the apples, which should be tart; and cook them in the water until soft; stewing them very slowly. Beat the sauce very smooth, and when partly cooled, add the beaten yolks of the eggs, the lemon juice and grated rind and the sugar, increasing the amount of sugar if desired very sweet. Line the patty-pans with paste, fill them with the mixture, and bake five minutes in a very hot oven. Beat the whites of the eggs stiff, add to them two tablespoons of sugar, spread the eggs on top of the tarts, return the latter to the oven and brown delicately.
A lemon-scented apple curd baked in individual pastry shells and finished with meringue. Two things in the original need attention before you start: the butter is listed but never used, and five minutes will not bake raw pastry.
- The missing butterThe quarter cup of butter appears in the ingredient list and nowhere in the method. Stir it into the hot apple pulp before you add the yolks, so it melts and the mixture cools a little at the same time.
- Blind-bake the shellsFive minutes in a hot oven sets the filling but leaves the pastry pale and raw underneath. Line the pans, chill, and bake the empty shells at 400F until dry and lightly coloured, then fill and return them briefly to set the custard.
- "A very hot oven"In period usage this is generally taken as somewhere around 450-500F, though the scales in cookbooks of the day vary. Use it for the filled tarts only if the shells are already baked; drop to 350-375F for the meringue so it colours without weeping.
- Patty-pansShallow individual tins, roughly the size of a modern muffin or tartlet tin. The recipe gives no yield; five apples' worth of filling will fill something in the region of eight to ten tins of that size, depending on how large the apples and tins are.
- The apples"Tart" here means a cooking apple that breaks down to a puree: Bramley or Northern Spy. Firmer tart varieties such as Granny Smith, and modern dessert apples generally, hold their shape and give a lumpy filling, so cook them longer and beat them hard.
- Cool before the yolks"Partly cooled" matters. Add beaten yolks to boiling apple pulp and they scramble in threads; let the pulp drop to about 140F, then whisk them in off the heat.
- MeringueTwo tablespoons of sugar to three whites is a very soft, old-style meringue that browns fast and holds only briefly. Spread it so it touches the pastry rim all round, which keeps it from sliding as it cools, and serve the tarts the day they are made.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, whose household titles were aimed at the same middle-class readership as its dressmaking patterns. The filling here is essentially an apple curd, closer to a lemon-cheese or lemon-curd tartlet than to a slice of apple pie, and the pattern of yolks-in-the-filling, whites-on-top is a thrift as much as a flourish: one set of eggs does both jobs and nothing is left over. "Tart" in English usage is often said to have meant an open pastry case with a set or fruit filling, in loose contrast to the covered pie, though the usage was never entirely settled, and the small individual version had been a fixture of English and American baking for generations before this book recorded it.