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Angelica and Apple Tart
(France.) Pare and core some fine apples, cook them with water to cover, sugar, lemon juice to taste, and a little nutmeg. When tender, pour off the syrup, add as much angelica, candied or fresh, cut up as apples, cook until thick, line a dish with puff paste, bake it ten minutes, fill with the apples and the angelica and syrup, cover with a meringue, as for lemon pie, bake until brown. Serve cold.
A French apple tart in which candied angelica does the work a spice normally would. The original assumes you know how a lemon meringue pie is put together and fills in only the differences.
- Angelica, and how muchAngelica is the candied green stem of Angelica archangelica, sold by cake-decorating suppliers and still made commercially in France. "As much angelica as apples" reads as equal volume, which is punishing by modern palates; a quarter of the apple weight in chopped candied stem gives the musky, juniper-and-celery note without swamping the fruit.
- Fresh angelicaFresh stems are a spring vegetable in parts of northern Europe and need blanching and candying in syrup before use. If gathering rather than buying, be certain of the plant: several members of the same family, including hemlock and hemlock water-dropwort, are lethal and grow in the same damp ground.
- Blind baking the shellThe original gives no oven temperature, only ten minutes. That short a time for puff paste implies a hot oven; around 425F, with the base docked and weighted so it does not dome, works. Puff will not brown through in ten minutes, so treat this as setting the structure, not finishing it.
- Reducing the syrupPour off the poaching liquid, add the angelica and boil hard until it is thick and jammy. This is the hinge of the recipe: a thin syrup will soak the puff base to paste and weep under the meringue.
- The meringue"As for lemon pie" means roughly three egg whites to six tablespoons of sugar, beaten to firm peaks. Spread it while the filling is still warm and seal it to the pastry rim all the way round; meringue laid on a cold filling separates and pools.
- Second bakingThe original says only 'bake until brown'. In a modern oven, 325 to 350F for 12 to 15 minutes suits the meringue better than the hot oven used for the pastry; higher heat colours the peaks before the interior sets.
- ApplesUse a variety that holds its shape in syrup, such as Braeburn or Golden Delicious. Many modern dessert apples are sweeter than older cooking fruit, so be free with the lemon juice and taste before sugaring.
- ServingThe original gives no tin size or yield; a 9-inch tart serving eight is a reasonable modern reading. Served cold, as directed, but eat it the day it is made; meringue over a wet fruit filling will not survive a night in the refrigerator.
Angelica reached the confectioner's counter long before it reached the pie: the stems were candied as a medicinal sweetmeat, credited with warding off plague, and the town of Niort in Poitou is traditionally held to have made a speciality of them from the eighteenth century onward, supplying the pale green batons that still decorate French cakes. By 1900 angelica was familiar to English and American cooks chiefly as decoration, which is what makes this recipe worth noticing — here it is a bulk ingredient, cooked down with the apple syrup until its resinous flavour runs through the whole filling.