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Currant Tart
Place three breakfast cupfuls of thoroughly cleaned currants in a basin with four ounces of powdered sugar. Line a tart-dish with paste and spread over it a tablespoonful of apple sauce; place the currants and sugar over this, put a rim of paste round the edge of the dish and moisten with beaten egg on both sides before putting it on, fasten it securely at the ends, put the dish in a moderate oven and bake for about fifty minutes. Take it out, sprinkle the surface well with powdered sugar, return it to the oven to melt the sugar, take out again, spread over some sweet jelly, and serve.
A plain fruit tart of the English school, written for a cook who already knows how to make short paste. Two words need translating before you start: "currants" and "powdered sugar."
- Which currantsMost likely fresh red or white currants on the stem rather than the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle, though the wording alone does not settle it. "Thoroughly cleaned" means stripped from the stems and picked over; the run a fork down the stem trick works well. Three cups is somewhere between three-quarters of a pound and a pound of fruit.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is the large cup of a Victorian service, generally taken as 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Treating it as a standard 8-ounce cup will not throw the tart off.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar. Four ounces is about half a cup. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and is not what is wanted in the fruit, though it is acceptable for the dusting at the end.
- Moderate ovenUsually read as somewhere in the 325–375F range; 350F is a safe middle. Fifty minutes at that heat suits a single-crust tart holding this much wet fruit, and the filling needs the time to set.
- The apple sauceMore than a flavoring. Unsweetened apple sauce spread on the raw pastry acts as a barrier that soaks up some of the currant juice, which otherwise floods the shell and softens the base. Worth keeping.
- The rim of pasteA strip of pastry laid on the moistened lip of the dish, sealed with egg wash top and bottom. It raises the wall so the juices stay in and gives the tart a finished edge. Press the joins firmly or they will spring open in the heat.
- The sugar glazeThe second trip to the oven is only to melt the dusted sugar into a thin shine, two or three minutes. Watch it, since sugar on a hot fruit surface goes from glossy to scorched quickly.
- Sweet jellyRed currant jelly is the obvious choice, warmed slightly and brushed on. Apply it while the tart is still warm but off the heat, not while it is in the oven.
- YieldAbout a 9-inch tart dish on these quantities, six to eight servings. Serve barely warm or at room temperature with cream; the filling firms as it cools.
Currant tarts belong to the English and Anglo-American kitchen-garden tradition, where red currant bushes were a fixture and the fruit, often said to be better suited to cooking than to eating out of hand, was commonly destined for tarts, jellies and summer puddings. The technique here is old-fashioned pastry work: a lined dish, a raised rim of paste built up on the edge, egg wash used as glue, and a finish of melted sugar and jelly to give gloss, all of it standard in British pastry manuals of the nineteenth century. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a reminder that the Waldorf's kitchen was not exclusively French-facing; the book gathers homely British and American items alongside the hotel's grander dishes. Red currants also point to the season and the supply chain of the period, since they are highly perishable and were largely a local, midsummer market fruit rather than something shipped.