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Cranberry Tart
Put about a quart of cranberries into a saucepan with one gill of water, sprinkle over one teacupful of moist sugar, place it on a brisk fire, stir gently with a spatula, and cook for about fifteen minutes. Remove from the fire, rub the fruit through a sieve into a basin, and pour it into a flat dish lined with paste. Put it in the oven and bake for twenty minutes, take out and let it cool. Beat to a stiff froth the whites of three eggs, and stir in three ounces of powdered sugar; spread half of this over the tart, make the surface flat with a knife, place the remainder in a pastry-bag, and decorate with any design. Then sprinkle over a liberal quantity of powdered sugar, brown the tart in the oven for about ten minutes, allow it to get cold, and then serve.
A cranberry purée tart under piped meringue, written for a kitchen where pastry shells and sugar syrups were assumed knowledge. The measurements need translating and the baking sequence needs rethinking.
- The hinge: get the purée thickSieved cranberry pulp with only a gill of water should be nearly as stiff as jam before it goes into the shell. If it slumps on the spoon, return it to the pan and reduce it, or the filling will soak the pastry and weep under the meringue.
- A gill and a teacupfulA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A teacupful is not a fixed measure; period tables put it anywhere from 4 to 6 fl oz, so read the sugar as roughly half to three-quarters of a cup, and taste after sieving, since cranberries vary.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar was damp unrefined sugar, closest today to light brown or a soft raw sugar. It brings a faint molasses note; plain granulated works but tastes flatter.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, what we call caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will make a slightly chalkier meringue; caster is closer to the original and dissolves well into the whites.
- A quart of cranberriesAbout 1 lb of fresh berries, a bit more than one standard 12 oz bag. Fifteen minutes on a brisk fire is ample; they burst within five and then simply thicken.
- Bake the shell firstTwenty minutes with a wet filling will not set raw pastry. Blind bake the lined dish at 400F until dry and pale gold, then add the filling and bake at 375F for the twenty minutes given.
- Browning the meringueThe recipe gives no oven heat. Ten minutes suggests a moderate rather than fierce oven, which dries the meringue through as it colours; a broiler or very hot oven browns the peaks in a minute or two but leaves the interior soft and prone to weeping.
- YieldThe recipe says only 'a flat dish'; a quart of fruit suits something in the region of a 9-inch tart, serving six or so. It is served fully cold, as the text directs, when the puree has set and cuts cleanly.
Cranberries are one of the few fruits in a book like this whose cultivated large-fruited species is North American; commercial cultivation began on Cape Cod in the early nineteenth century and spread to New Jersey and Wisconsin. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) records the Waldorf's working repertoire, and this tart is a characteristic hybrid: a native berry treated by French pastry method, sieved to a smooth purée, set in a lined flat dish, then finished with a piped meringue and glazed in the oven, the same treatment given to apricot or currant tarts in the continental tradition. The instruction to pipe "any design" is a reminder that the pastry cook, not the recipe, was expected to supply the decoration.