Hannah Glasse and Apple Tarts

Well, to the few the followers of this sporadic adventure in historic cookery, I have a new episode for you.

Fairly recently I came into possession of a reproduction copy of a wonderful, English, eighteenth century cookbook.  This would be the incredible text, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, by Hannah Glasse.  It was first published in 1747, and continually updated and revised over the course of her life and well after her death in 1770.  The edition I have was first published in 1796, illustrating some of the time span it was published over.  Like any cookbook of the time period, it was more intended for use by wealthy families, but really by the domestic servants who worked for those families.  Many cooks, some of them well-renowned in their profession, published books of cookery for the masses.  In my humble opinion, hers is by far the easiest to use, though I do still have to look through the lens of a modern eye.  The book has been likened to Irma Rombauer's Joy of Cooking, but I see the text more like a cross between that and Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  It has some of the best descriptions of how to cook I have seen in an 18th century cookbook, but has a plethora of recipes, racking up a total of 398 pages before the index.

Can you see that I love this woman's cookbook?

Also in the recent past, though really it was in October, I was invited to go cook at a local historic site in their reproduced tenant building. It was a wonderful experience.  I got to put on one of my other personas and drag myself out to a dark, smoky building with tables too low to really be counters, and climb in to a hearth.  I had an incredible time.  By the time I got home, I realized I had spent the entire day crouched over doing something I love, and my car stunk of wood smoke.  Can you say shower and laundry three time fast?

I used one of Mrs. Glasse's recipes while I was there.  After that I kind of promised myself I would make as many of her recipes as I could over time.  Among friends this has sparked a few questions over whether or not I would pull a Julie and Julia.  While that is kind of the reason I started this blog in the first place, no I will not be doing that.  I have an intellectual acceptance of sweetbreads and other people eating them, I refuse to make them.  (If you don't know what sweetbreads are, and you are American, do not look them up.  You will not like it.  In my non-scientific, cultural experience you will be grossed out.)  There are also the medical recipes, some of which contain wonderful ingredients like quicksilver (mercury).  I might to make one or two of them just to do it.  There is great recipe called To make a fine Bitter, which looks to be an infusion which brings the quinine properties out of some plants, which is good for malaria.  But that would probably be a waste of good brandy.

In any case, in the future you will probably see a number of recipes from The Art of Cookery because I really like it.  Also, many of them will currently be my experiences in the trenches, cooking over the hearth and not necessarily in the modern fashion.  Largely this is because I am on a tight budget and I have to be able to afford the ingredients to make it more than once.  I will at some point update them all to modern techniques when I can fiddle with them, or make a very good estimate on what will work.  A lot of what I do is art more than science.

That being said, I have a recipe for you that I made while I was cooking over the open hearth:  Apple Tarts.  Below are the two recipes that I used to make the tarts and the pastry.

To Make Different Sorts of Tarts

If you bake in tin patties; butter them, and you must put a little crust all over, because of the taking them out; if in China or glass, no crust but the top one. Lay fine sugar at the bottom, then your plums, cherries, or any other sort of fruit, and sugar on top; then put on your lid, and bake them in a slack oven. Mince-pies must be baked in tin patties because taking them out, and puff paste is best for them. For sweet tarts the beaten crust is best; but as you fancy. You have the receipt for crust in this chapter. Apple, pear, apricot &c. make thus: apples and pears, pare them, cut them into quarters, and core them; cut the quarters across again, set them on in a sauce-pan with just as much water as will barely cover them, let them simmer on a slow fire just till the fruit is tender; put a good piece of lemon-peel in the water with the fruit, then have your patties ready. Lay fine sugar at bottom, then you fruit, and a little sugar at top; that you must put in at your discretion. Pour over each tart a teaspoonful of lemon juice, and three tea-spoonfuls of the liquor they were boiled in; put on your lid, and bake them in a slack oven. Apricots do the same way, only do not use lemon.

Paste for Tarts

One pound of flour, the quarters of a pound of butter; mix up together, and beat well with a rolling pin.

Another Paste for Tarts

Half a pound of butter, half a pound of flour, and half a pound of sugar; mix it well together, and beat it with a rolling-pin well, then roll it out thin.

(Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, pg 144)

I ended up using the second pastry, though if you choose you may use the first, and I am sure the tart would come out just as good.  And let me tell you, this was an experiment in learning the capacity of my fist for holding flour because there were no measuring cups.  And when they tell you things like "mix well till it looks good," hey as much as you might hate reading that, it's a good description.  And when it came to baking, each batch of tins (I had twelve or so, but only six or seven fit in the dutch oven) baked a little differently depending on how the coals were arranged and who was paying attention to it.

The results were spectacular.