“At its simplest, pastry is just a quantity of flour mixed with half its weight in fat and bound with water.” If you want a recipe for shortcrust though, Nigella’s is as straightforward as you can get. If you are going to make your own it needs to be thin, but not so thin that the filling leaks out and substitute a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice for the water that you’d usually use. For us, it had the perfect breadcrumb to syrup ratio.Īny plain shortcrust recipe will do the trick – or you can use store bought. And the verdict? While everyone agreed that Nigella’s version was lovely, my family preferred the more traditional version, so that’s the one I’m bringing you today. ![]() I baked both – a couple of weeks apart, of course. On one side I have the challenge to cook my way through Nigella’s How To Eat and on the other a deep desire to keep to traditional methods. This did, of course, present me with a conundrum. More traditional offerings, such as those by Yorkshire born and bred James Martin, did not. I found some recipes agreed with her inclusion of double cream, some included both cream and eggs, and Fortnum & Mason’s uses clotted cream, zested orange and lemon and apple. Her comments about it being non-traditional had me running back to google. “I know this isn’t traditional but don’t be tempted to leave it out: it gives a soft roundedness to the sweet filling and stops it from drying out.” She also uses double cream in her filling: She uses a plain shortcrust pastry in her tart with some lemon juice mixed into the water that you’d usually use to bind the pastry. Naturally, given that this is a Nigella challenge, I had to make Nigella’s recipe. The idea of binding breadcrumbs with sugar, however, is an old one – medieval gingerbread was made in this way, but with honey.Īnyways, you can see why, when times were tough, this pudding was so popular – stale bread and cheap syrup equalled a big calorie and sweetness bang for very little buck…so to speak. Yes, other than golden syrup, fresh breadcrumbs are the major ingredient in the filling for this tart. The treacle tart, in its current carnation, dates back only to the invention of golden syrup in the late 1800s.Īs well as being a classic English “nursery” or comfort food pudding, treacle tart is an example of baking at its most frugal as this tart is actually a fabulous use of leftover bread. A little light googling soon provided the answer to that: the word treacle refers to all forms of syrups made during sugar refining, from golden syrup through to black molasses. The first is that treacle is nowhere to be found on the ingredients list – although golden syrup is. Where I had been originally intending to skip past this recipe in How To Eat, now I was quite looking forward to it.īefore I get into the recipe itself, another couple of points about treacle tart. What we got was a thin tart with a sort of jammy texture that was a little like eating dark honey on toast – with perfect pastry and custard, that is. ![]() I’d thought it would be treacly dark, almost like molasses, and teeth shatteringly sweet. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t what was presented to us. When I tried it that day in Bakewell, I really enjoyed it. ![]() As an aside, I still don’t understand why wine isn’t classed in the same way as kombucha…actually, I do understand, I just like to say that so please don’t write and offer an explanation. Of course, I’d heard of it, it’s just that I’d decided that I probably wouldn’t like it if ever I were to try it – me not eating sugar other than in its fermented form (ie. I must confess to never having tasted treacle tart until we were in Bakewell.
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