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Vienna Tart
Roll out some good puff paste, line a plate with it, and bake it, then fill it with a rich custard, flavored with lemon or vanilla; when firm, put a circle of cooked peaches, halved, around the edge, then one of green gages inside of that, and fill the centre with cherries. Serve cold, in the same dish, with whipped cream.
A Victorian assembly job rather than a baking project: a blind-baked puff shell, a set custard, and three tiers of preserved fruit. Everything can be made a day ahead and put together shortly before serving.
- The custard must set"A rich custard" here needs to be firm enough to hold fruit; a pastry cream — roughly 2 cups milk or half cream, 4 egg yolks, 1/2 cup sugar and 3 tablespoons cornflour or flour, cooked until it boils and thickens, then chilled — is the safest reading of "when firm." A thin stirred custard with no starch will slump under the peaches.
- "Line a plate"A shallow ovenproof plate or a 9-inch tart tin. Puff paste rolled about 1/8 inch thick, docked with a fork, weighted with beans and baked at 425F for 15 minutes, then uncovered until dry and coloured, gives the crisp base the recipe assumes.
- Puff pasteHomemade puff paste of the period was usually all butter, though some recipes used part lard. Frozen all-butter puff is a fair stand-in; trim the rim neatly, because the fruit rings need a flat surface to sit on.
- Green gagesGreengages are a small green-gold dessert plum, briefly in season in late summer and often sold as bottled fruit in the period. Any halved poached plum works; drain it very well, as syrup running into the custard is the main way this dish fails.
- Cooked peachesAround 1900 these would most likely have come from a preserving jar, home-bottled or commercially canned. Tinned peach halves in juice, patted dry, are the direct equivalent; fresh peaches want a short poach in light syrup and thorough draining.
- CherriesThe recipe does not say, but cooked rather than raw is the likelier reading, so the centre matches the softness of the rings around it. Bottled morello or sour cherries, drained, give the colour contrast the arrangement is aiming at.
- Assemble lateFill and decorate no more than two or three hours before serving and keep it refrigerated. The pastry stays crisp for about that long once the custard goes in.
- Cream and yieldKeep the whipped cream lightly sweetened or unsweetened, since the fruit carries syrup; a scant tablespoon of sugar per cup of cream is plenty. Serves six to eight in thin wedges.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre of American books published around the turn of the twentieth century in which a cook travels through Europe and brings home dishes as souvenirs, tidied into a form a middle-class household with one servant could manage. The name "Vienna tart" is a label of that kind rather than a specific Austrian recipe: Vienna stood, in English and American writing of the period, for pastry work and coffee-house confectionery in general, much as "Vienna bread" and "Vienna rolls" did on bakers' signs. What the recipe actually describes is the standard European fruit tart — blind-baked shell, pastry cream, glazed or preserved fruit laid in concentric rings — a construction generally traced to the professional pâtissier's window, where the geometry was the selling point. Its appearance in an English-language household book may owe something to two nineteenth-century developments: the availability of preserved stone fruit, whether bottled at home or commercially canned, which made peaches, greengages and cherries available out of season and all at once, and the spread of ice or a cold larder, without which a custard tart could not easily be served cold with confidence.