One of the things I am always grateful for living here in the UK, is that I have spent the last twenty years living in a very close proximity to the European Continent, or "The Continent" as it is referred to here. When we lived down in Kent, we could be sitting at an ouside cafe in France enjoying a hot drink by mid morning, depending on how early we got up.
This was always really nice. We often went over to Calais and Bologne sur Mer for a day's shopping. There was a huge Carrefour in Calais, so we would go sight-seeing in Bologne, have lunch and then double back to Calais and load up on French goodies before catching the train through the Euro-tunnel back to England.
One time we went over with our friends Jo and Colin and spent a day traversing all down the coast line from Calais South-bound, stopping to have a picnic along the way. It was a lot of fun. Did you know the French are obsessed with any thing Egyptian? I discovered that on that particular trip. It was astonishing.
One thing the French do really well is breads, cheeses and wines/spirits. I believe their bread is some of the best in the world. Once you have enjoyed a fresh French Croissant, you are spoiled for any other kinds.
That is one thing I really love about travelling to other countries. Being able to try their foods. I am a culinary tourist more than anything else!
One year we were blessed to be able to spend a few weeks down in the Bordeaux/Dordogne region of France with our friends Audrey and Peter Lee. What a wonderful time we had. Peter had rented a stone cottage out in country side.
We spent our days hiking and exploring and then would come back to the cottage in the evenings where I would whip up a dinner for us from what we had managed to gather in the daytime during our travels. On that visit I got to try beautiful Caneles from the medieval town of Saint Emilion.
I fell in love with those beautiful French pastries. A beautifully rich caramel interior sealed into a crispy caramelised shell. So delicious!
Another time we stayed in the Alsace region of France/Germany. This region is an area in the North East of France that has alternately been either French or German throughout the centures, reflecting a mix of the two cultures. At the moment it belongs to France.
We spent a full day in Strasbourg which is the capital of the Alsace region. There is a street there that is lined with tall poles on both sides. There are stork nests situated on the top of each pole. I had never seen anything like it. Not before, not since. Storks (Cigognes Blanche are the symbol of Alsace, as is this fabulous Bacon and Onion Tart.
Tarte Flambee/Flammekeuche is its official name. It is sort of like the French/German equivalent of Pizza, but don't say that too loud or they might throw you in jail! haha
Essentially it is a round flat, open-faced tart with a beautiful incredibly crisp pastry bottom. This is topped with sour cream/creme fraiche, caramelised onions, two cheeses and beautiful Alsatian bacon/lardons.
Simple, and yet incredibly delicious in its simplicity. Along with the Choucroute Garnie (essentially sauerkraut and smoked meats/sausages) it was one of my favourite foods from the region. We enjoyed the Choucroute one day at an open table in a market square. It was served with the most delicious boiled baby potatoes.
Alsatian Bacon & Onion Tart
Ingredients
- 2 TBS olive oil
- 1 large onion, thinly sliced
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
- 2 TBS white wine or Calvados (French apple brandy)
- 1 sheet frozen puff pastry, thawed
- 1/2 cup (125g)of creme fraiche (about 1/2 cup)
- 8 rashers of bacon, par-cooked (see notes) and chopped
- 1/4 cup (20g) of grated gruyere cheese
- 1/4 cup (20g) of grated cheddar cheese
- egg wash made with 1 egg yolk beaten with 1 tsp of milk or water
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 200*C/400*F/ gas mark 6. Line a baking tray with baking parchment.
- Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onions, salt and black pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until they are soft and golden brown. This will take about 15 minutes.
- Add the wine or Calvados, if using, and stir gently to release any flavourful browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Simmer until the wine is evaporated, about 2 minutes.
- Remove the pan from the heat and allow to cool.
- Roll the pastry out on a lightly floured surface to a circle, about 13 inches in diameter.
- Transfer the rolled out dough to the prepared baking sheet. Spread with the creme fraiche evenly over the pastry, leaving a one inch border free all the way around the edge. Sprinkle evenly with the chopped bacon and the onions. Top with the grated cheeses.
- Fold over the exposed edges of the dough, fluting decoratively as you go, forming a 1 inch border. Brush this border with the prepared egg wash.
- Bake until the tart is golden brown and the bacon is crisp, about 20 to 25 minutes. Cut into 6 to 8 slices and serve hot.
notes:
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. 
Last
year at this time I was writing on another website as well as here. One of the recipes that I posted over there, but not over here was this delectable Apple & Cardamom Custard Tart.
I have always regretted not posting it here. It surely belonged here and so today I am righting that wrong. Today I am sharing it here so that my English Kitchen readers can enjoy it as well.
Its a beautiful tart and I remember being very proud of how it turned out. I thought it was perhaps one of the most beautiful things I had ever created!
Its actually quite a simple tart to make. The base is ready-made puff pastry. I like to use an all butter puff pastry if I can get it. Regular puff pastry can sometimes have a bit of a chemical taste to it.
All butter puff pastry is the way to go. Everything natural, nothing artificial.
The filling for the tart is a mix of ready made custard, egg yolks and mascarpone cheese. You mix this together and add some vanilla and ground cardamom before chilling it in the refrigerator.
While that is chilling (along with the tart base) you get on with the business of slicing the apple. That is probably the fiddliest part of the recipe. Slicing the apples.
You need so slice them thin enough that you can easily manipulate them. Even then it will be a bit hard. I found it easiest to work with very thin half slices of apple.
They were much more malleable. You need to be able to roll them into rosettes, so thin and malleable is the way to go.
Once your base and filling have chilled you are ready to start building the tart. You will need to spread the custard/mascarpone filling into the pastry base.
Then you just start rolling the apple slices into rosettes, sticking them down into the cream filling. The cream filling holds them in place. You don't need to be overly pedantic about this.
Just make as many whole rosettes as you can and then fill in the spaces around them with smaller rosettes. You can even fill the spaces in with curls.
Trust me when I say, it will come out beautiful no matter what. You don't need perfection here. It will look beautiful no matter what.
I can remember being so worried that it would come out looking messy or ugly if I didn't get every single rosette perfect. I probably spent far more time on this than I should have.
In the end it looked beautiful, despite its imperfections. It really did. I felt really proud of what I had accomplished and a bit silly for having worried about it.
See what I mean? That doesn't look bad at all. Its quite pretty actually. You get some really pretty perfect looking rosettes ad some not so pretty wonky looking rosettes. Truth be told, they shift a bit in the oven while baking.
You really do need to make sure that your apple is sliced thin enough that they will cook in the prescribed length of cooking time. You may think even so it doesn't look like much, but wait.
A light dusting of icing sugar brings this tart fully to life. It changes something interesting looking into something quite magical and beautiful.
But looks isn't everything. What does it taste like? I can tell you, it is delicious! You get the buttery flaky puff pastry on the bottom
That custard filling is beautiful. Its rich and indulgent. It tastes like vanilla with just a hint of cardamom. I think the richness is largely due to the mascarpone cheese.
It ends up being a cross between a custard and a cheesecake. Rich and velvety. Incredibly delicious. I could eat that filling all on its own with nothing else at all.
The apple is a bit of tart and a bit of sweet. It gets a tiny bit caramelized because of the fruit sugar soak that you put the slices in before you start rolling them.
It has a dual purpose, both for flavour and a bit of sweetness as well as maintaining the lovely white colour of the apple flesh. You could also add a bit of cinnamon or even more ground cardamom to give them a bit more flavour.
But really they are quite delicious all on their own. Just as they are. I seldom do fancy things like this really. I am quite lazy most of the time. That's why I wanted to bring this tart over here.
Apple & Cardamom Custard Tart
Ingredients:
- 1 pound of all butter puff pastry
- 1 1/3 cups (330g) ready made custard
- 3/4 cup (180g) mascarpone cheese
- 2 large free range egg yolks
- 1 tsp vanilla paste
- 1/4 tsp ground cardamom
- 4 medium red skinned sweet eating apples
- 1 TBS fine sugar
- 1 TBS fresh Lemon Juice
- Icing sugar to dust
- pouring or whipped cream
Instructions:
- Butter a 9 ½ inch round loose-based fluted tart-tin. Roll the pastry between two sheet of baking paper into a round large enough to line the bottom of the tin and up the sides.
- Whisk the custard, mascarpone, egg yolks, vanilla paste, and cardamom together in a bowl until well combined. Cover and place in the refrigerator until well chilled.
- Core and half the apples lengthwise. Cut into thin half-moons. Toss together in a bowl with the fruit sugar and lemon juice.
- Spread the custard mixture in the pastry base. Arrange the apple slices on top of the custard, slightly overlapping them into attractive rosette shapes. Drizzle with any juices left in the bowl.
- Preheat the oven to 325°F.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 50 minutes or until the pastry is golden brown and the apples cooked. Cool and then refrigerate for 1 hour prior to serving.
- It may seem a bit fiddly, but you will soon get the hang of it, and trust me when I say that the impressed look on your guest’s faces when you serve it to them will be well worth any extra efforts utilized.
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The
English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are
reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you
may report it to me at: mariealicejoan at aol dot com
Thanks so much for visiting. Do come again!
There are a few food things that come to mind when you say the word Canada. That is if you know Canadians at all. One is Poutine, that delicious dish of crisp chips and squeaky cheese curds, smothered in hot gravy. Another is Maple Syrup. I swear our veins run with maple syrup, not blood.
Peameal Bacon, lean, juicy and rolled in cornmeal. Montreal Smoked Meat sandwiches. Quebec Pea Soup, made with whole yellow peas. Molasses cookies. Beaver Tails. Lobster Rolls from the Maritimes and their infamous fish chowder. Nanaimo Bars, three layers of non-baked heaven, and the Piece de la Resistance . . . Butter Tarts.
It is impossible to be a Canadian and not love most if not all of those things. And we do them very well. And there are others. Saskatoon Berry Pie. Pierogi. Pouding Chomeur also comes to mind as do Bannock and Tortiere.
I think our Canadian flag should be marked into segments with each one representing one of these traditional and delicious dishes, with the maple leaf (on a bottle of maple syrup) holding court in the centre of the flag.
We invented Tim Hortons! Americans used to come up to Canada just for the Tim Hortons Coffee. The drive-throughs of Tim Horton's all across the country are jam packed every morning with Canadians in their cars wanting their double doubles on their way to work.
They do have Tim Hortons here in the UK now, but I have not been to it. I have heard however that it is not as good as back home, and actually, I have heard that back home Tim Hortons is not as good as it used to be either.
Change is not always good. They used to have a resident baker on the premises every night. He would work all night making cakes, donuts, etc. for the next day. Now I hear, they bring everything in from a central warehouse, frozen. I fear it has lost the personal touch.
Butter Tarts are very similar to the Scottish Ecchlefechan tarts. I strongly suspect this recipe was brought over to Canada with the Scottish settlers when they immigrated.
We had Ecchlefechan tarts when we were in Scotland on holiday a few years ago. I have to say that they were very similar
So just what is a butter tart? Let me see if I can find adequate words to describe this decadent, moreishly delicious Canadian treat that is impossible to resist.
Tarts made with flaky buttery pastry and filled with an ooey gooey brown sugar and maple filling, stogged full of toasted walnuts and sticky raisins.
You can find other kinds with chocolate chips and all sorts stuffed into them. But the original and the best is just four things. Flaky pastry. Rich and sweet maple filling. Toasted walnuts. Sticky raisins. That's it. Simple.
When I was a child the first thing my sister and I did when we got our allowance was to high-tail it to the Canex store and go halves on a package of ready made butter tarts. They came two to a pack.
I don't think we would even wait until we got home to eat them.
We would crack them open while we sat on the grass right at the top of the hill leading down to the Canex. Every mouthful was ecstasy and we wanted the pleasure to last as long as we could make it last.
Those butter tarts had nothing on this recipe. This recipe I am sharing with you today is the best recipe (in my opinion) for buttertarts ever invented. I copied it many years ago into my Big Blue Binder.
The Big Blue Binder is a binder I have carried with me all over the world. Anyone who has been reading me for a while knows that it is filled with my tried and true recipes, gleaned from years of travel. Recipes shared with me from family and friends.
When people share their recipes with you, you just know that they are good. Nobody shares their worst. Its a fact. You can bank on it.
This recipe for Butter Tarts is the first recipe in my pies and pastry section. It is the best in my opinion. I cannot tell you how many times I have baked these over the years.
It copied right there in black ink in my what-used to-be beautiful handwriting. (Key boarding has ruined that for me I have to say!) The page has been splotched on and is becoming tattered and yellow from age.
I thought it was about time I got it down here so it didn't get lost forever. I can't tell you where it came from. I haven't bothered to note the source in this instance.
I had the habit of only noting sources when the recipe came from family or friends. Recipes copied from books, magazines, newspapers, etc. were not source-noted.
Who knew that one day we would be able to share these delicious things with people and readers from all over the world! This was pre-computer days.
The only thing I can tell you with impunity is that it came from either a magazine or a book and I am thinking if it was a magazine it was Canadian Living.
I miss Canadian Living Magazine. I used to buy it every month. It was filled with everything Canadian, from fashion to decorating, crafts and of course cooking.
My other favourite magazine used to be Chatelaine. I bought that religiously as well. They were my textbooks on my journey towards becoming a good and solid cook.
The rest came from my mother and Home Ec at school. Home Ec taught me basics that I have never forgotten. It was my favourite subject and not just the cooking term. I loved the sewing and the houskeeping terms as well.
I think perhaps I should have been a Home Economist. That is a career I could have quite happily embraced. Never mind . . . I did love being a stay at home mum, and I loved being a Chef in my later years.
This recipe has a gorgeous rich filling that is gooey and decadent. It is flavoured highly with pure Maple syrup and brown sugar. Do NOT be tempted to use pancake syrup. It might work and it might not, but I can tell you one thing, they will not be like or taste the same as a real Canadian Butter Tart.
Do not be tempted to overfill your pastry cases with the filling. It does expand in the oven and you will end up with pastry/tarts that are stuck to your tin and a sticky baked on mess to clean off. Trust me. Cement.
I use my butter and lard pastry. You can find that recipe here. It is a lovely pastry. Nice and flaky. I use it for all my pies and tarts. It always turns out.
Canadian Butter Tarts
Ingredients:
- Pastry to line 18 patty pans ( I like my butter/lard pastry)
- 2 large free range eggs
- 1 cup (200g) soft light brown sugar, packed
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 2 tsp white vinegar
- 1/2 cup (120ml) maple syrup, pure not artificial
- 6 TBS (86g) butter, melted
- 2/3 cup (80g) chopped toasted walnuts
- 1/2 cup (75g) raisins
Instructions:
- Preheat the oven to 230*C/450*F/ gas mark 7. Line your patty tins with the pastry. Divide the chopped nuts and raisins between each pastry lined tart.
- Beat the eggs. Add the sugar, salt, vinegar and syrup. Blend well together. Beat in the melted butter until all is well emulsified.
- Fill you pastry lined tins 2/3 full with the egg mixture, pouring it over top of the fruit and nuts.
- Bake in the oven for 10 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 180*C/350*F/ gas mark 4. Bake a further 20 minutes.
- Allow to cool for about 10 minutes then remove to a wire rack to finish cooling.
- Enjoy!
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you may report it to me at: mariealicejoan at aol dot com
Thanks so much for visiting. Do come again!
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Rustic Tomato Pie
Ingredients:
- 5 to 6 ripe tomatoes, cut into 1/2 inch thick slices
- 1 tsp granulated sugar
- 1 tsp sea salt
- 1 TBS butter
- 1 medium onion, peeled, halved and cut julienne
- 220g mayonnaise (1 cup)
- 60g grated Gruyere cheese (1/2 cup)
- 90g grated Parmesan cheese (1/2 cup)
- 2 1/2 TBS chopped fresh basil, plus extra to garnish
- 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves, chopped
- coarse black pepper
- 1 sheet of all butter puff pastry
- 1 large free range egg yolk
- 1 TBS milk or light cream
Instructions:
- Slice your tomatoes. Sprinkle them with the seasalt and sugar and then sit them in a colander set over a bowl to drain.
- While they are draining, melt the butter in a skillet. Add your sliced onion and cook them slowly over medium low heat, stirring occasionally for 25 to 30 minutes until lightly caramelised. Remove from the heat.
- Stir the mayonnaise, both cheeses and the chopped herbs together.
- Preheat the oven to 190*C/375*F/ gas mark 5. Line a large baking sheet with some baking paper.
- Unroll the puff pastry and place onto the baking sheet. Score a rim 1/2 inch around the outsides of the sheet of pastry. Prick all over the centre using a fork. Spread with 3/4 of the mayonnaise mixture, reserving the remainder to dot the top of the tart.
- Sprinkle the caramelised onions over the mayonnaise mixture on the tart base.
- Pat the tomato slices dry and arrange them over the top of the caramelise onions in a decorative manner. Season with some coarse black pepepr.
- Dollop the remainder of the mayonnaise mixture here and there on top of the tomatoes.
- Whisk together the egg yolk and cream/milk. Brush this mixture on the border around the tart edge.
- Bake for 20 to 25 minutes until crisp and golden, and the cheese filling has melted.
- Garnish with some fresh basil and serve, cut into squares.
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