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Cherry Flawn
Put three pounds of cherries into a preserving pan, with twelve ounces of sugar, and some water, and cook them until done. Strain the syrup into a saucepan, thicken it by reducing, put in about a quarter of the cherries, and reduce again until it falls in sheets from the spoon. Line with puff paste a flawn ring, put in the cherries that are not crystallized, and bake for forty-five minutes in a quick oven, spreading a piece of buttered paper over the top. Take away the paper, dampen the crust, and dust with sugar; glaze this with a salamander, or in the oven, and pour over the crystallized cherries together with the syrup, and serve.
An open cherry tart in the older English sense, with part of the fruit boiled down to a candied garnish. Two pieces of vanished equipment and one sugar stage do most of the work here.
- The hinge: "falls in sheets from the spoon"The reduced syrup and its quarter-portion of cherries must be cooked until a spoonful sheets off in a curtain rather than dripping — roughly the setting point of jam, about 220F. Stop short of that and the finished tart floods; go past it and the garnish turns to hard candy as it cools.
- A flawn ringA bottomless metal ring (a flan or tart ring) set on a baking sheet. The recipe gives no size; the quantity of fruit suggests a large one. A loose-bottomed tart tin of the same size does the same job.
- A quick ovenConventionally read as somewhere in the region of 425 to 450F, though the book gives no temperatures; that range suits puff paste. Forty-five minutes is generous at that heat -- look at it from 30 minutes on, and judge by the underside of the pastry rather than the clock.
- Weights and measuresTwelve ounces of sugar is a little under 1 3/4 cups. The recipe does not say whether the three pounds of cherries is weighed with stones in; if it is, expect roughly 2 1/2 to 2 3/4 pounds of pitted fruit.
- The buttered paperIt shields the exposed fruit and rim from scorching in a fierce oven. Buttered parchment or a loose sheet of foil serves; remove it for the final glaze so the sugar can colour.
- A salamanderA cast-iron disc on a handle, heated red in the fire and passed over the surface to caramelise sugar. An overhead broiler, watched closely, is the modern equivalent — the dusted crust goes from glazed to burnt in under a minute.
- Wet fruit on puff pasteOscar drains the syrup off before the cherries go in, and that is deliberate. Keep the pastry cold until it meets the oven, and dock the base so it does not lift under the fruit.
- YieldRoughly eight servings, depending on the size of the ring. Best the day it is baked; the glaze dulls and the crust softens overnight.
"Flawn" is one of the oldest words for a tart in English, from Old French flaon and Late Latin flado, a flat cake, itself generally taken to be of Germanic origin -- the same root that gives modern Spanish and French flan. In medieval and early modern English cookery a flawn was usually a shallow open case filled with custard, cheese curd or fruit, and by the nineteenth century the term had largely dropped out of general use, surviving chiefly in the professional kitchen attached to the bottomless ring that shaped it. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection reflects the French classical idiom of the Waldorf's pastry work: the flawn ring, the buttered paper and the red-hot salamander were all standard hotel-kitchen equipment of the period, and reserving part of the fruit to candy in its own reduced syrup is a pastry-cook's trick for getting a glossy garnish without commercial glaze.