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Apple Open-Tart
Place the quantity of apples to be used in a saucepan after peeling, coring and slicing them, and add a little sugar and water together with a small quantity of lemon-peel and grated nutmeg. Cook gently until the apples are quite tender, then put the mixture in a basin to cool. Cover a shallow pie-dish lined with rich puff-paste with the mixture to a depth of about half an inch. Then place on top more of the paste rolled out into strips running from side to side to the edge of the crust. Trim and bake in a moderate oven until done, which is known by the crust being easily separated from the dish. Turn out carefully onto another dish, and serve.
Oscar gives no quantities at all, which is normal for a professional kitchen book of 1896 — the pastry chef was expected to know. Here is what the sparse instructions assume.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350–375F. Puff pastry, though, wants a hot start to get its lift: a hotter first 15 minutes, around 400–425F, then down to 350F to finish the base.
- QuantitiesFor a 9-inch shallow dish, about 2 lb of apples (six medium), 2 to 4 tablespoons sugar depending on the fruit, a couple of tablespoons water, a strip of lemon peel and a few grates of nutmeg. Serves six to eight.
- The filling must be coldThis is the hinge. Warm apple on raw puff paste melts the butter in the layers and the base steams rather than rises. Cook the apples down, then chill them thoroughly — refrigerate rather than just letting them stand in a basin.
- Cook the apples dryOnly a little water, and let it drive off. A loose, wet compote will soak the bottom crust and the tart will not release from the dish as Oscar's doneness test requires.
- Not the modern American open-faced tart. The strips laid "from side to side to the edge of the crust" make a latticed or barred top; "open tart" in this period generally seems to mean a tart without a solid pastry lid, so that the fruit shows.
- Rich puff-pasteFull puff pastry, laminated with butter. All-butter frozen puff is a fair substitute; rough puff made at home is closer in texture to what was meant than the modern shortcrust many people default to.
- Turning it outInverting a fruit tart out of the dish and onto another is asking for trouble unless the base is genuinely crisp and the dish is generously buttered. A metal tart tin with a removable base achieves the same clean presentation with less risk.
- Lemon peelUse a wide pared strip, not zest, and fish it out before the mixture goes into the pastry. It is there for perfume, not to be eaten.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf, and his 1896 Cook Book is really a working reference of formulas rather than home instruction, which explains why this one names no weights. The apple open-tart itself is old and English in shape: stewed apple under a barred pastry lid, seasoned with lemon peel and nutmeg, a pairing often said to be long established in English apple cookery, in a period when nutmeg was commonly used with cooked fruit and imported lemons were reasonably available in city kitchens. Its presence in a Waldorf book is a reminder that a grand American hotel's repertoire in the 1890s was built on French technique laid over plain Anglo-American baking, and that a pastry chef reading this would have needed only the sequence, not the recipe.