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Apple Flawn
(England.) Line a deep round tin with puff paste, bake it, and fill it with apple-cider jelly, mixed with 2 tablespoonfuls of currants and boiled down pretty thick. Over the top spread a layer of orange marmalade and a lattice of puff paste. Bake it to brown the paste and serve cold.
A late-Victorian tart built from three ready-made elements — baked puff pastry, a thick cider-apple jelly, and marmalade — so nearly all the work is in getting the filling stiff enough to hold a lattice.
- The hinge: reduce the jelly properlyIf the cider-apple jelly is not boiled down until it mounds on a spoon and pulls away from the pan bottom, it will weep into the pastry base and soak the lattice from below. Take it further than looks necessary; it firms considerably as it cools.
- "Apple-cider jelly"The term most likely meant an apple jelly made or loosened with cider, or boiled cider reduced to a jelly-like consistency; the recipe does not define it. Either a good apple jelly loosened with cider and reduced, or boiled cider concentrate cooked down with apple puree, gives something workable.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black ones. Two tablespoons is a light hand; they are there for texture and specks of dark colour rather than flavour.
- The tinA deep round tin suggests a straight-sided tart or cake tin; no size is given, so use whatever depth and diameter you have. Line and bake the shell fully -- the recipe cooks it before it ever meets the filling.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives none. Puff pastry needs a hot oven; blind bake the shell with weights until dry and coloured, and give the lattice a shorter second bake, just long enough to brown it as directed.
- Marmalade layerSpread it thinly, and preferably only once the jelly is cold and set, or the two layers marble together. Any orange marmalade will do; the recipe specifies nothing further.
- Lattice stripsCut them from chilled puff paste, chill again before laying them on, and egg-wash. Laid over a cold set filling they bake through cleanly rather than sinking.
- Yield and servingSlices will depend on the tin, since none is specified. Serve fully cold, as directed -- warm, the jelly slackens and the slices will not hold their shape.
Flawn comes from the Old French flaon (via Latin flado, a flat cake), and in medieval and Tudor English cookery it meant a tart baked in a pastry case, usually holding a custard or a sweetened cheese or fruit filling. By the nineteenth century the word had faded from everyday use in most of England, surviving mainly in older regional cookery and in self-consciously antiquarian recipes like this one, an English dish collected and labelled by country. The construction here is thoroughly late-Victorian rather than medieval: it uses jelly and marmalade, and it assembles them into something that only needs a final browning. Boiled cider, used both as sweetener and as a setting agent, was a staple of apple-growing districts on both sides of the Atlantic, a way of keeping the autumn crop in usable form through the winter.