Emberday Tart For Dummies ========================= I usually describe Emberday Tart as "a sort of medieval quiche". It's a cheese and onion tart with cinnamon, currants, and other yummy things, and is remarkably tasty. It's also actually really easy to make, once you know how - the idea of this page is to set that out in the simplest terms possible, so anyone who wants a crack at it can do so. Why do I know how to make emberday tart? Well, I used to belong to a student society called the Arthurians, dedicated to the tales of King Arthur. Our big annual event was a costumed medieval banquet, typically consisting of 8 or 12 courses, for up to 120 people. Somehow, near the start of my time with the society, I was conscripted to cook the first course: emberday tart. Quite simply, I never escaped, and have been making it on-and-off for about ten years now. A note on amounts: a 12-course banquet is a large meal, so the portions in each course are kept small. The amounts given below will make a large tart, filling a roasting tray, which we would then divide into 30 or 40 small rectangular bite-size chunks. For my most recent banquet I made 4 such tarts, to feed 160 people. You might want to halve the amounts and use a smaller pie dish - but once you taste it you might regret that. :-) Cost: about 10 UK pounds. Time: about an hour to prepare, about 2 hours to cook. Ingredients ----------- Onions...: 2 lb chopped (about 6 medium onions should suffice) Eggs.....: 8 Butter...: 1 pack (eg Lurpak unsalted) Sugar....: 2 Tablespoons Cinnamon.: 2 teaspoons Ginger...: 1/2 teaspoons Sage.....: 4 Tablespoons fresh or 3 teaspoons dried (I used dried) Parsley..: 1 cup (or as I put it, "some") Currants.: 8 Tablespoons Cheese...: 1 lb (see notes below) Pastry...: Enough. I use 1 pack ready-made shortcrust from Asda. :-) Tools ----- * All the usual stuff plus... * You really want a blender of some sort - either a food processor or an upright liquidiser is good. You can live without it, but it makes life easier/quicker/smoother. * A rolling pin. The first few times I made emberday tart I forgot this and had to use a wine bottle instead. :-) * A roasting tray to cook the tart in. The kind that you cook a turkey in is ideal. We got ours from Pioneer for 99p - bargain. Method ------ 1. Chop the onions. You want 2lb _when chopped_. 2. Start boiling the onions. They'll need at least ten minutes, but I basically leave them until I've got everything else together - it doesn't hurt. Stir them occasionally and make sure they don't boil dry (lids may help). 3. Crack the eggs. 4. Start melting the butter in a small pan. Don't let it boil. Keep the wrapper from the butter packet, you'll use it later. 5. Put the sugar, cinnamon, ginger, sage, parsley and currants in with the eggs, and blend those suckers. Regarding the parsley: if you're using a blender you can just pick the sprigs off the stalks, discarding the stalks. Without a blender you'll also need to chop the sprigs up a bit, unless you want big bits of parsley in your tart. Clue: you don't. 6. Butter should be melted by now. Add it to the mix and blend further. 7. Right, that's the core of the tart mixed up. Looks yummy, doesn't it? Take a sip of your neglected beer/wine. 8. This is usually the point where I turn the onions off. About ten to fifteen minutes ought to have passed. 9. Grease the roasting tray using the butter wrapper. Yummy. 10. Roll out the pastry to the required size. It'll probably get pretty thin. Don't forget to dust the surface you're rolling on with flour first. I did once and it was a mess. 11. Lay the flower on the roasting dish, ensuring you cover it completely. It will shrink in the oven so make sure it's just hanging over the edges - and trim it to that point. Prick the bottom to let bubbles out, and pop it in the oven at gas mark 4 for about 10 to 15 minutes. This gives it chance to shrink and harden slightly before we add the mix. 12. Drain the onions and blend them into a soupy mush. Add it to the eggs/butter/everything-else mix, stir, and watch colour fade. 13. Now it's time to add the cheese: grate it into the mix, stirring it in. See notes below about grating and cheese texture. 14. Once you're happy with the way your mix is looking, and have got rid of all of the lumps of cheese, take the tray out of the oven, pour in the mix (should almost fill it), and put it back in. If the pastry's shrunk back too far, you can add some more but it's probably not going to help much - it'll just shrink again. I never worry too much about the sides anyway: we always trim the pastry from the sides and so its main function is to just stop the tart mix from burning at the edges. 15. Bake that sucker. It'll take about two hours at gas mark 4. The top will go a gorgeous brown, then a dark brown. By the time you get it out it'll probably look burnt. Don't worry, it's fine inside. I'd like to find a way round this but haven't - if anyone knows, please tell me! 16. The way to test if it's done: get a clean knife and stick it into the middle of the tart. If it comes out clean, it's ready. If it comes out a bit wet/messy, it's not. Notes ----- 1 The cheese: I've done this with Sage Derby and Y Fenni. You could, of course, use any cheese you wanted. You probably want something reasonably strong tasting, though. Sage Derby is green and reminiscent of a strong cheddar. Its texture is excellent but it does make the tart very green and in my opinion not as tasty as Y Fenni. Y Fenni is to my mind the classic cheese for this dish - a softish Welsh cheese with mustard, absolutely delicious and it makes the tart a gorgeous mid-brown. Unfortunately it's a complete bitch to grate because it's so soft - it has a tendency to recoagulate like plasticene! The trick is to grate it into the rest of the mix, stirring it in constantly - once the mix gets on the grated cheese it prevents it mushing up. It _does_ work, it's just a bit messy. Oh yes, and _don't_ be tempted to melt it as I was once. It didn't help and just made a big mess. 2 Do use sugar, not salt... One year I had two tarts to make, and the ingredients were supplied to me in little transparent bags. I made the first tart and put it in the oven. Then I made a cup of coffee before starting the second. I sugared the coffee. I tasted the coffee. Ewww.... salty! The bag of white crystals which I thought were sugar were in fact salt, and I'd used that in the first tart. I made the second with sugar and they tasted very different. People's opinions of emberday tart that year were sharply polarised between "fantastic" and "disgusting". Original Recipe --------------- Just out of interest, here's the original recipe I had to work with: Tart on Ember Day (English 14th cenury) [ An Ember day is a day of prayer and fasting observed on the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday after the first Sunday of Lent, Whitsunday, September the 14th and December the 13th - Gwalchafed ] Ancient Cookery p. 448/38 Parboil onions, and sage, and parsley and hew them small, then take good fat cheese, and bray it, and do thereto eggs, and temper it up therewith, and do thereto butter and sugar, and raisyngs of corince, and powder of ginger, and of canel, medel all this well together, and do it in a coffin, and bake it uncovered, and serve it forth. Chop the onions and boil 10 minutes, drain. Grate cheese. Mix everything and put in pie crust. We used Meunster; a more strongly flavored cheese might be better. AMG 2001.11.23.1044