Cranberries

History

Amelia Simmons's cranberry tart is made like the fruit tarts around it: the berries are stewed soft, strained to a smooth pulp, sweetened, laid into her Royal Paste (a butter, egg and sugar enriched crust), and baked gently, the same handling she gives stewed apples. The fruit at its center is native to North America, a sharply tart wild berry that long predated the English kitchen it entered here. Indigenous peoples of the northeast gathered it, dried it into storable cakes, folded it into pemmican with pounded dried meat and fat, and boiled it with sweetening as a sauce to eat with meat, a use an English traveler in New England had already recorded in 1671. Setting that native fruit into print, Simmons's book is among the first American cookbooks to keep a cranberry recipe at all, and it is also the first to suggest cranberry alongside turkey, though that pairing is a savory sauce and not this sweet baked tart. What the recipe leaves unsaid weighs as much as what it keeps: it fixes no measure of berries or sugar, names no particular sweetening, and gives the dish no season or occasion, trusting the cook to strike the balance for a berry prized above all for its sourness.

Ingredients

• cranberries
• sugar
• royal paste

Instructions

1. Stew, strain and sweeten the cranberries.
2. Put the filling into paste No. 9 (Royal Paste).
3. Bake gently.