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Brambles
1/4 lb. (I cup) seeded raisins 5 walnuts I lemon 1 egg 2 ozs. (1/2 cup) currants Grated nutmeg to taste Pastry 4 ozs. (1/2 cup) sugar Chop the raisins and walnuts, and mix them with the currants, sugar, nutmeg, the egg, well beaten, and the grated rind and strained juice of the lemon.
Roll out the pastry, and cut out some rounds the size of a small saucer. Fill one-half with the raisin mixture, wet the edges with water, turn the other over, and pinch the edges together. Place the brambles on a greased tin, brush over the surface with sweetened milk or beaten egg, and bake in a moderate oven for twenty-five minutes.
A British filled turnover, close kin to Eccles and Banbury cakes. The recipe assumes you already have pastry made and know how to handle it, so the notes below fill in the gaps.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven here is 350–375F (180–190C). If you use puff or rough puff pastry rather than shortcrust, start at 400F (200C) for the first ten minutes to set the layers, then drop back.
- How much pastryThe recipe gives no quantity. Rounds "the size of a small saucer" run about 4–4½ inches; something in the region of 12 oz (350 g) of shortcrust, or a standard sheet of ready-rolled puff, should give roughly eight to ten.
- The raw egg is a binder, not a custardOne beaten egg into a cup of chopped fruit gives a filling that sets just enough to stay put. Skip it and the sugar and lemon juice will run out of the seams during baking.
- Seal properlyThis is the hinge. Wet edges, press firmly, and crimp — the sugar liquefies and will find any gap. A small steam vent cut in the top helps, and leaving a ½-inch border free of filling makes the seal reliable.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" means the seeds have been removed, not that seeds were added. Ordinary supermarket raisins are already seedless; a quarter pound is about a cup, packed.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black kind, not fresh red or black currants. Two ounces is about a third to half a cup depending on how tightly packed.
- WalnutsFive walnuts means five whole shelled nuts — roughly ¼ cup chopped. Toasting them briefly before chopping sharpens the flavour against the sweetness.
- SugarFour ounces of sugar to a cup and a half of dried fruit is sweet by modern taste. Cutting it to 2–3 oz still binds the filling and lets the lemon come forward.
- ServingBest eaten warm rather than hot, when the filling has firmed up. They keep two or three days in a tin and reheat well at 325F for a few minutes.
Brambles belong to the large family of British enclosed fruit turnovers — Eccles, Banbury, Chorley, Coventry godcakes — all built on the same logic of dried fruit, sugar, spice and a scrap of pastry, a way of turning store-cupboard raisins into something worth putting on a plate. The name has nothing to do with blackberries, though where it does come from is unclear. Nutmeg and lemon rind were among the flavourings of the Victorian and Edwardian larder, cheaper and longer-lived than fresh fruit, and a recipe like this one appears in a book called The Something Different Dish: no new shopping, just a different handling of what was already in the jar.