Où sont les tartes des Demoiselles Tatin d'antan? 1

The recipe for the dessert now usually called tarte Tatin normally starts with making some caramel, which is used to partly fill a pie dish which is then filled with sliced apples or other fruit. But a couple of days ago I was flicking through a memoir-cum-cookbook, How to Cook a Rogue Elephant: The Recollections and Recipes of Peter van Rensselaer Livingston, and I came upon a recipe for what he calls "La Tarte des Demoiselles Tatin", which he says is a speciality of the region around Chartres. The interesting difference is that instead of making the caramel first, he starts by putting a thick layer of sugar into a disposable aluminium pie-dish, and then filling the remainder of the dish with sliced apples and then a pastry lid (although oddly the pastry lid isn't specified in the directions). The whole is then baked for 25 minutes low down in a very hot oven. The recipe given is supposedly "more or less as it appears in Larousse Gastronomique".

A disposable pie dish is specified because, as with any other recipe, you invert the tarte to serve it, but PvRL suggests cutting the disposable dish away to serve.

I would love to know if anyone has tried this recipe, or is game to try it (I'm not).

¹ My apologies to François Villon for this.

>1 haydninvienna: That sounds like a recipe for a big mess. Like one of those"Life Hacks" you see in videos that are twice as complicated as the usual methods of doing something.

I looked up the recipe in my The New Larousse Gastronomique. The difference I see is a thin pastry dough in the bottom of the pan, a sprinkle of fine sugar, and a latticework top crust. Then when it's done, pour a fruit jelly of your choice through the latticework. I predict that method will be much easier to get out of the pan and in to the serving plate. The apples are the same though! :)

The French woman I learned how to make this from certainly did not make caramel first. Har "layer" of sugar was also not thick, just a sprinkling, little enough that my diabetic husband could rat it.. I think she used bought puff pastry for the lid. She was very specific, though about the right apples to use. It had "gris" in the name. I suspect that it works better because it is less juicy that most.

I have made several up side down cakes recently, using my cast iron frying pan. (My husband was away.) The cakes released really well, although I had to clean the pan well afterwards. That would probably also work for Tarte Tatin as well.

Hmmm. Haven't done this in a very long time, but the apples from our tree might work. From trying to use them for jam yesterday, I know that they do not release lots of juice. Oh, and I am sure that Denise did not fill her pan with chopped apples, but carefully made circles of slices.

>2 MrsLee: >3 MarthaJeanne: PvRL specified "half an inch" of sugar in the pan. There are a good few recipes that direct you to use a cast-iron pan, make the caramel in that, and then put the apples (etc) on top. The pan with its contents then goes into the oven.

As to the right kind of apples: I've seen recipes that use pears, bananas (as Adam Liaw commented, basically bananas Foster in the oven), and pineapple. Also tomatoes (I'm not even sure I want to think about that).

The point as she made it was not a lot of caramel. The point was apple.

This was in the bottom of the oven at 200° for 20 minutes, then in the middle for another 5. It cooled as long as I needed to prepare my pear cake before turning out. The handle of the pan was still warm, but no longer hot.

As you see, because of the variety of apples, there is no loose juice around.

>4 haydninvienna: I will clarify, for me, this would turn out to be a hot mess. The caramel in the pan thing does not work well for me. I'm sure I am missing something in the technique, but I end up with a goo that either won't come out, or runs all over. I've not tried this specific recipe, because of my allergy to apples. I have made a pineapple upside down cake, and cinnamon rolls with a lot of goo in the bottom of the pan, which was delicious when flipped over. I never thought of that as caramel though. I thought caramel had to have milk in it? Otherwise it is just a sugar syrup, no? Is this one of those cross-country language things?

>7 MrsLee: caramel does not need milk. It refers to sugar that has browned. Most often dry sugar is heated until it melts, and then starts to brown. When it is brown enough, the process is usually stopped by adding liquid -often milk or cream. It is possible to make caramel by heating a sugar syrup until it browns. By then the water is mostly boiled off.

Part of the trick with these things is not to turn them out too quickly (runs all over), but also not to let it cool too much first (a goo that won't come out). Hot caramel is very liquid, but cold caramel is sticky.

Most directions for making caramel scare me because the temperatures are so high. I can easily burn myself on boiling water at 100°. How much damage could I do with a liquid at 160°? I don't really want to find out.

A while since I posted here ...

From the library: A Suitcase and a Spatula by Tori Haschka. Tori has turned up on Adam Liaw's show a few times and she is usually good for some fun, but also seems to be a pretty decent cook. One piece of Tori's wisdom I completely agree with: "But the most important thing we learnt was how to pack. Beyond a passport and a credit card, all we really needed was an open mind and an appetite".

Only a few pages in so far, but so far so pretty good.

ETA I think I'm in love. She has a recipe for a Berocca frappé (a Berocca tablet, 120 ml cold water, 250 ml pineapple juice, mint leaves and a banana — put the Berocca in the water till the fizzing subsides, add pineapple juice, mint and banana, blend.)

>9 haydninvienna: That does sound fun.

>10 MrsLee: Basically, there's 2 kinds of cookbook: ones that are fun to read, and ones that are useful. The categories aren't mutually exclusive. of course. Within reach at the moment, I have 7 Days of Dinner by Adam Liaw, which is useful, and the book by Tori Haschka, which is fun to read. I'm not going to say that Tori's book isn't useful because I haven't tried any of her recipes, nor am I going to say that Adam's book isn't fun to read.

Agreed. I have quite a few cookbooks I have read and tried only one or two recipes from, but I've learned things from all of them.

>11 haydninvienna: There's a 3rd category...the absolutely terrible. I've hit some doozies.

>13 lesmel: The only one of that category that I remember was from a religious group which said spices were of the devil and were killing us. That one literally got thrown across the room, then into the recycle bin.