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Plum Tart
Peel five dozen black plums and arrange in a tart-dish in layers, sprinkling over each layer with a little caster-sugar; the stones are not to be removed. Make a border of short paste round the rim of the dish and cover it with a flat of the paste. Ornament the tart, brush it over with a little water and sprinkle it over with some caster-sugar. Put in a moderate oven and bake.
A deep double-crusted fruit pie in all but name, written in the shorthand a hotel pastry cook would have understood. Two things need spelling out: the stones stay in, and the oven gets a number.
- The stonesLeaving the pits in turns up in period plum and cherry tart recipes, and cooks of the day held that the kernels perfume the juice and that the fruit holds its shape better; both are traditional claims rather than tested ones. If you follow it, tell everyone at the table before the first bite; stones crack teeth and are a choking risk for children.
- "Moderate oven"Roughly 350 to 375F. Timing depends on the dish, but expect somewhere in the region of 45 minutes to an hour for a tart this deep — the pastry should be set and pale gold and the juices bubbling at the edge.
- Five dozen plumsSixty plums only makes sense for small fruit: Italian prune plums, damsons, or similar, amounting to several pounds and filling a large deep dish. With large modern black plums, roughly a dozen would give a comparable volume.
- PeelingPlums do not peel with a knife easily. Dip them in boiling water for 15 to 20 seconds, then into cold water, and the skins slip. Peeling is optional today and skipping it gives more colour and pectin.
- Short pasteShortcrust — flour, butter, a little sugar and water. The "border round the rim" is a strip of pastry laid on the moistened rim of the dish to give the lid something to seal against; it is what keeps a wet filling from lifting the crust off.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar. Granulated works inside the tart; for the sugared top, caster or superfine dissolves more evenly and crusts better. Figure 3/4 to 1 cup total between the layers, adjusted to how tart the fruit is.
- The juice problemNo thickener is specified, so the filling will be soupy. Either accept it and serve in bowls with cream, or toss the fruit with 2 to 3 tablespoons of cornstarch or fine tapioca. Cut a vent in the lid either way.
- YieldA 9- or 10-inch tart of this depth serves eight. It is better warm than hot, and better still the next day at room temperature.
Oscar Tschirky's book gathers the working repertoire of the Waldorf kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century, and its pastry section leans heavily on English and French practice — a "tart" here is a covered fruit pie in a deep dish, much what an English cook would have called a plum tart a generation or two earlier. Leaving the stones in appears to have been ordinary rather than careless, and it also spared the labour of pitting five dozen small plums by hand. The instruction to build a pastry border on the rim before laying on the lid is an older method for a deep dish, and it can still be found in English cookery writing into the twentieth century.