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Orange Tart
Mrs. P.
Squeeze two oranges and boil the rind tender, add half a teacupful of sugar and the juice and pulp of the fruit an ounce of butter; beat to a paste; line a shallow dish with light puff paste, and lay the paste of orange in it.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how to handle puff paste and how long citrus peel takes to soften. The gaps are the peel-cooking and the baking, neither of which is stated.
- The hinge: boil the rind properlyThe peel has to be genuinely soft before it is beaten to a paste, which means 30 to 45 minutes at a simmer, not a brief blanch. Change the water once or twice along the way; a single boiling leaves the pith bitter enough to dominate the tart.
- Half a teacupfulA nineteenth-century teacup is variously reckoned at anywhere from about 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so this is somewhere around a third of a cup of sugar, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 ounces. With two oranges' worth of juice and pulp that is a moderately sweet filling; taste before it goes into the shell, since orange acidity varies.
- An ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. Add it while the peel is still warm so it melts into the paste rather than staying in streaks.
- Beat to a pasteA food processor does in twenty seconds what a mortar or chopping knife did in ten minutes. Pulse rather than run it continuously if you want some texture in the peel; run it through if you prefer a smooth marmalade-like filling.
- Baking, which the recipe omitsPuff paste needs a hot start: 425F for 15 to 20 minutes to set and lift the pastry, then down to 350F until the filling is set and the base is coloured, another 10 to 15 minutes. Blind-baking the shell first gives a crisper bottom, since this filling is wet.
- "Light puff paste"Bought all-butter puff is a fair substitute for what Mrs. P. would have made by hand. "Shallow dish" means a tart tin or pie plate of about 8 to 9 inches, not a deep pie dish; the filling from two oranges is thin.
- YieldOne 8- to 9-inch tart, six modest servings. Good cold.
Orange tarts of this kind belong to a long English line of "orange puddings" and marmalade tarts that go back well before the nineteenth century, when the whole fruit -- peel, pith and juice -- was boiled and pounded rather than discarded. Sugar and oranges were both once luxuries, and the technique of boiling rind tender is the same one that produces marmalade. The Home Cook Book, compiled in the 1870s from contributions by local women identified largely by surname or initial, prints it in the compressed, telegraphic style typical of such community collections: Mrs. P. is writing for neighbours who know what puff paste is and need only the proportions.