Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Apple Tart and Custard
Apple Tart and Custard
Place a border of rich puff-paste around the pie-dish and put in some apples pared, cored and cut into thin slices; sprinkle over them a little sugar and grated rind of lemon. Mix a little lemon-juice with some water, pour it over the apples and cover with a crust of paste. Place in the oven, baking for about three-quarters of an hour, then remove and with a sharp knife cut away all the inside of the crust, leaving merely the border. Pour over the apples a little boiled custard, grate over a little nutmeg and allow the tart to cool, and serve.
A late-Victorian double-crust apple tart that is unroofed after baking and flooded with custard — the lid is structural, not something you eat. Plan for the crust to be sacrificed.
- The hinge: the lid comes offThe top crust is there to trap steam and cook the apples through; after baking you cut it out from inside the rim and discard it, leaving the pastry border standing. Cut with a small sharp knife held nearly vertical, just inside the border, while the tart is still hot and the pastry crisp.
- Oven temperatureOscar gives none. Puff paste wants a hot start — 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and lift the border, then down to 350F for the remaining half hour so the apples soften without the pastry scorching. Three-quarters of an hour total is right for sliced apples.
- Puff-paste borderA strip of all-butter puff about an inch wide pressed around the moistened rim of the dish, with the lid laid over and sealed to it. Store-bought all-butter puff is a fair substitute for hand-made puff paste.
- ApplesUse a firm cooking apple that holds its shape — Bramley collapses to sauce, which defeats the point of slices under custard. Golden Delicious, Braeburn or Northern Spy slice thin and stay distinct.
- Unspecified quantities"A little sugar" for a 9-inch dish might be a few tablespoons up to about 1/3 cup depending on the apples; the lemon juice and water together need only be 2 to 3 tablespoons, enough to make steam. More liquid and you will have a soupy tart once the lid is gone.
- Boiled custardThe term here means a stirred custard, not one actually boiled: egg yolks, milk and sugar cooked gently (a double boiler is the safest route) and thickened to coat a spoon, or it will curdle. Roughly 4 yolks to 2 cups milk. No flavouring is specified. It is poured over warm and sets only slightly as the tart cools.
- NutmegGrate it over the custard at the last moment. Pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of what makes the finish worth doing.
- Yield and servingA 9-inch dish serves six to eight. Serve at room temperature, not chilled — the custard tightens and the pastry border goes leathery in the refrigerator.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume was assembled for a hotel kitchen but drew heavily on the domestic English and French repertoire its readers already recognised, and this tart is squarely English in construction. Cutting the lid from a baked fruit pie and replacing it with custard is an old trick found under names like "apple tart with custard" — the sealed crust does the work of a lid on a saucepan, steaming the fruit, and is then removed because it has done its job. The pairing of baked apple with a stirred egg custard belongs to the same English tradition that produced the trifle and the fool, where custard was the standard sauce for almost any cooked fruit. Nutmeg over the top is often said to be the period's usual finish for anything containing milk and eggs, a habit that outlasted the spice's earlier status as an expensive import.