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Raspberry Tart
Line a flat dish with a rich paste; over this spread twelve ounces of apple marmalade, place a strip of paste round the rim and bake in a moderate oven for thirty minutes. Remove the tart to the door of the oven, sprinkle it over plentifully with powdered sugar, push it back into the oven, close the door and bake for about two minutes to melt the sugar. Remove it, let it get cold, scoop out with a spoon about half of the apple, fill it up with one and one-half pints of well-cleaned and carefully-picked raspberries, spread the top over with two ounces of apple jelly, and serve cold.
An open fruit tart built in two stages: a baked apple-marmalade base, glazed with sugar, then partly hollowed out and filled with raw raspberries. A few of Oscar's terms need translating.
- Moderate oven350F. The initial bake needs to set the pastry and drive moisture out of the apple, so use the lower rack or a preheated baking sheet under the tin.
- "A flat dish" and "a strip of paste round the rim"This is a shallow tart tin or a pastry round built free-form on a baking sheet, with a rolled rope of dough laid around the edge to make a wall. A 9-inch tin is the right scale for 12 oz of filling.
- Rich pasteA rich short pastry (pâte brisée with sugar, or pâte sucrée); period usage of "rich paste" can also stretch to puff paste, so the recipe does not settle it. Blind-baking is not called for because the thick marmalade layer protects the base, but chill the lined tin well before filling.
- Apple marmaladeNot citrus marmalade. In this period it means apples cooked down with sugar to a stiff, spreadable purée, much drier than modern applesauce, which is too wet and will soak the crust.
- The sugar glazeOscar asks only that the sugar melt, and two minutes in a moderate oven will do little more than wet it. If you want a properly lacquered finish, use a broiler or a blowtorch and watch it constantly; powdered sugar scorches in seconds.
- Scooping out half the appleThis is the hinge of the recipe. The tart must be completely cold and the apple layer firm, or you will tear the pastry pulling it out. Leave an even quarter-inch of apple on the base as a moisture barrier under the fruit.
- QuantitiesOne and a half pints of raspberries is roughly 1 lb 2 oz, or about three 6-oz supermarket punnets. Two ounces of apple jelly, warmed until pourable and brushed on, is enough to glaze the top.
- Yield and timingServes six to eight. Assemble the raspberry layer within an hour of serving — the berries weep and the glaze slides once they sit.
Tarts of this construction — a cooked, sweetened fruit base topped with raw soft fruit and sealed under a jelly glaze — belong to the French pâtisserie tradition that shaped hotel cooking in New York at the turn of the century, and Oscar Tschirky's kitchen at the Waldorf was organised on French lines. The apple layer is doing structural work as much as flavour work: apple is high in pectin and sets firm, which makes it a stable bed for berries that would collapse if baked. Why half of it is then scooped out the recipe does not say. Raspberries were a short-season fruit before refrigerated rail freight was routine.