We’re concluding our baking in the Dutch oven series with this wonderful little fruit
tart. I think you’re going to be surprised with this one. Thanks for joining us today
on 18th Century Cooking.
Our recipe today comes from Maria Rundell’s 1808 cookbook, “A New System of Domestic
Cookery.” This is a recipe for a minced pie, but it’s a little different. It’s
got a different twist on it. It’s a lemon minced pie. Let’s get started.
Today we’re baking this in one of our 8 inch tart tins. These guys are hand made by
Dennis Kutch, one of our tin smiths. He does a wonderful job. They’re available in the
print catalog and on our website. The original recipe actually calls for making this in patty
pans and probably the closest thing you’ve got in a modern kitchen is a cupcake tin so
this is actually meant to be small individual little pies or tarts. Today we’re making
this in one of these tart tins because of course we’re going to be baking in a Dutch oven.
If you’re going to be using one of these 18th century style tart tins, the bottom doesn’t
come out of this so you want to make sure to butter it really, really well or you’ll
never be able to get it out of the tin. This tart tin’s already well buttered. We can
just lay in our paste in the bottom, any paste will work fine here, but short paste will
work great and if you’re interested in a short paste recipe I’ll put a link to our
short paste episode down in the description section below.
Our first ingredient is lemon peel and you might immediately say, “well, wait a minute
Jon, did they have lemons in the 18th century?” Obviously you see lemons all over in the cookbooks.
It really depends on where you’re located and the economic level of the person as to
how common lemons would be in their standard daily diet, but obviously they’re very popular
in the cookbooks. In this particular setting, we’re going to be using lemons. What we’re
going to do is, we need lemon peel and you can just peel off the peel of your lemon,
cut it off in one nice long strip to make it easier to work with and boil your lemon
peel about 20 minutes. This is going to get rid of some of the bitterness and make it
much easier to work with. Once we’ve boiled this lemon peel, we can take it out and mince
it nice and fine.
To mix this up, we need a nonreactive bowl, something like a ceramic bowl or a wooden
bowl. Inside this, we’ve got 1 large apple chopped up. It’s been pared and cored and
chopped rather finely. You’ll want to use some baking kind of apple. Golden Delicious
might work well in this. That’s what we’re using right now. To this, we’re going to
add the diced lemon peel that I talked about earlier, ¼ cup of suet, ¼ cup of sugar,
the juice of 1-2 lemons, and ½ cup of raisins. Mix these up well. We are using suet in this
recipe. It can be difficult to find. We do sell a USDA approved suet in our catalog and
on our website. You may be able to find some kinds of suet in your local supermarket or
at your butcher shop. Again, if you’re interested in suet I want to point you to an earlier
episode we did on rendering your own suet.
We need to cook this at around 400 degrees so we’ll need to get this Dutch oven nice
and hot before we put this in and make sure it’s got plenty of coals. It’s going to
bake probably 20 minutes or so.
And there we go. This one’s definitely cool enough to handle. If we wanted this to really
set up so that we might be able to get it completely out of the pan, you’ll want to
let this cool overnight, maybe even in the refrigerator or someplace really cool to let
it really solidify, because it’s going to be hard to get out of this tart tin. Some
of those juices have boiled up out of it and come down the edges so it’s going to be
hard to get out. I’m just going to take a slice out of this guy, because there’s
no way at this kind of temperature that it’s going to come out whole.
Let’s give this a try.
That’s got an amazing punch to it. This is wonderful. I can see why they call it a
lemon minced pie. It’s got a wonderful lemony flavor to it. That lemon peel and the lemon
juice really come through and yet you get these other chunks of, I guess the meat of,
the tart which is the apple and the raisin, which give you a wonderful sweetness, but
the flavor that really comes through is the lemon.
So this concludes our Dutch oven series on a wonderful note. This will definitely make
a wonderful dessert. If you’re in the field and want to do a simple one, excellent, you
can make the crust right there. None of these things needs to be refrigerated so you can
definitely do this in the field. So wonderful, if you get a chance, you can try this at home.
Again, wonderful dessert dish. Definitely give this one a try.
I want to thank you for coming along while we experiment with these Dutch ovens, while
we see exactly what you can do in a Dutch oven in the field. Amazing things, wonderful
dishes, great. I want to thank you for coming along as we savor the flavors and the aromas
of the 18th century.
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the button right up here. Also check out our related videos. Thanks so much for watching.