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Banbury Tarts
One cup seeded and chopped raisins; one cup sugar; three tablespoons cracker crumbs; one egg; one tablespoon of butter; one-eighth teaspoon of salt; juice and rind of one lemon. Roll puff paste one-eighth inch thick and cut in threeinch squares. Put a teaspoon of the Banbury mixture in the center of one corner, wet edges of paste and fold to form a triangle. Prick several times and bake.
A one-bowl filling wrapped in puff paste turnovers. The only real difficulties are the vanished cracker and the missing oven temperature.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither. Puff paste needs a hot oven — 425F — for 15 to 20 minutes, until the layers have lifted and browned. A cooler oven melts the butter out before the steam can raise the dough.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" means the seeds have been picked out by hand, as was necessary with muscat raisins a century ago. Ordinary seedless raisins need only chopping; about a cup, chopped, weighs 5 oz.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs came from plain soda or water crackers, and their job here is to absorb the lemon juice and egg so the filling does not run out of the pastry. Crushed saltines or dry unseasoned breadcrumbs do the same work; three tablespoons is roughly 15 g, a little more if the crumbs are very fine.
- Lemon rindGrate the zest only, avoiding the white pith. With a full cup of sugar to one lemon, the filling is sweet rather than sharp.
- Cooking the fillingMany versions of this filling are simmered a few minutes before use, and it is worth doing: heating the raisins, sugar, butter and juice together for three or four minutes thickens the mixture and makes it far easier to spoon without tearing the paste. Cool it completely before filling, or the pastry softens.
- Sealing and ventingA teaspoon per three-inch square sounds miserly but is correct — overfilled turnovers burst. Brush the edges with water, press firmly with a fork, and prick the tops as directed so steam escapes rather than blowing a seam open.
- YieldA pound of puff paste rolled one-eighth inch thick gives roughly 20 to 24 three-inch squares. At a teaspoon per square, the filling as written makes far more than that, so either roll more paste or scale the filling down. They are best the day they are baked.
Banbury tarts descend from the Banbury cake, a spiced dried-fruit pastry associated with the market town of Banbury in Oxfordshire; a recipe of the type appears in print as early as the late sixteenth century, and the town's cake shop is traditionally said to have been selling them from the 1630s. The English article is an oval, flaky, currant-filled pastry rather than a triangle. By the time American cookbooks took up the name in the nineteenth century the form had shifted to a small turnover of puff paste, the currants had become chopped raisins, and lemon had replaced most of the older spicing. The cracker crumbs suggest a household rather than a bakery origin — a cheap, always-present binder used the way a modern cook would reach for breadcrumbs or flour. The Butterick Cook Book, issued by a pattern company for readers of its magazines, carried a good deal of this sort of thing: a small sweet built from pantry staples and a scrap of leftover pastry.