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Banbury Tarts
(England.) Banbury, of nursery fame, is celebrated for a certain kind of tart or turnover which its bakers have sold for many years. Beat 1/2 pound butter to a cream, with 1 pound of candied orange and lemon peel, cut fine, 1 pound currants, 1/2 ounce of cinnamon, and 1 ounce of allspice. Make some puff paste, quite rich, set it on ice overnight, and roll it, very thin, cut into squares. Fill these with the mincemeat, fold into triangles, pinch the edges, dust with sugar and yolk of egg, bake 15 minutes in a hot oven, and serve cold.
A rich fruit turnover in the Banbury manner, with a filling that is essentially candied peel and currants bound with butter rather than the suet mincemeat the recipe's word "mincemeat" implies. Two things need adjusting before you bake: the spice, which is heavy even by Victorian standards, and the oven, which needs to be genuinely hot.
- The spice is the hingeHalf an ounce of cinnamon is roughly 2 tablespoons ground, and an ounce of allspice about 4 to 5 tablespoons. For a filling of this size, 2 to 3 teaspoons of each gives a recognisably spiced Banbury filling; the full amount is very heavily spiced.
- Hot ovenFor puff paste this means 425-450F. A cooler oven lets the butter leak out before the layers set, and these tarts depend entirely on the lift of the pastry.
- Weights and yieldThe filling comes to roughly 2 1/2 lb, enough for about 24 to 30 turnovers made from squares of 4 inches. Scale the filling down by half unless you are baking for a crowd; it keeps, covered, in the refrigerator for a week.
- Beat the butter to a cream firstCream the butter alone until pale and soft, then work in the peel, currants and spice. Cold butter will not coat the fruit and the filling will crumble out of the pastry.
- Candied peelBuy whole candied peel in caps or halves and chop it yourself. The pre-diced supermarket mixture is largely sugar syrup and turns to liquid in the oven.
- "Dust with sugar and yolk of egg"Brush the sealed triangles with yolk thinned with a little water, then scatter granulated sugar over. Do it in that order or the sugar will not stick.
- SealingWet the pastry edges lightly before folding and press firmly with a fork. Butter-heavy fillings expand and will force open a dry seam; a small steam vent cut in the top helps.
- ChillingThe overnight rest on ice is not optional for puff paste rolled this thin. If the dough softens while you are filling, return the tray to the refrigerator for 20 minutes before baking.
- ServingServe cold, as instructed. The filling is scaldingly hot from the oven and the flavour only comes together once the fat has set.
Banbury, in Oxfordshire, is the town of the nursery rhyme -- "Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross" -- which is what the author means by "of nursery fame," and its spiced fruit pastry has been sold commercially since at least the seventeenth century; a shop in Parsons Street is traditionally credited with the trade, though the frequently repeated dates attached to it are hard to document. The Banbury cake is a cousin of the Coventry godcake and the Eccles cake, all of them flat enclosed pastries of currants and candied peel that belong to the older English tradition of sweet, heavily spiced "mince" fillings, before mincemeat narrowed to a Christmas preserve. This book collects dishes by country for American readers, and Banbury tarts appear as a piece of English local identity as much as a recipe -- the sort of thing a traveller would have bought at the railway station.