Toaster Pastry from the 1700's?

Dear John Townsend, I hope this finds you well. I have been a long-time viewer of your channel back from when it just took off over, it must be eight years or so ago. I was inspired by the recipe exchange you did with Mrs. Crocombe. I myself cook historical food and partake in things like the SCA. And on top of that I work for Heston Blumenthal at his three-star Michelin restaurant and he also recreates historic dishes that I've had the pleasure of pairing wine with. All that and Mrs. Crocombe's video inspired me to write a letter to you as if I was sharing a recipe that might still have been explored in 18th century Britain. You'll notice that the letter was written in the winter of last year. Perhaps the delay will add to its authenticity. If you choose to use this for a video, I'd be delighted. If not, I'm just pleased that you read it. This is also the first letter I've written using an inkpot and classic calligraphy pen. I was nervous sending my first classically written letter to someone, I respect so, but it will motivate me to keep going and hopefully you'll eventually receive a letter that looks far better. Wishing you the very best of fortune and health and P.S. Nutmeg forever. This is a letter that we have received from one of our channel subscribers and he includes this sealed note here with some recipes inside. I can't wait to dig this open and see exactly what he has included. So this internal letter is dated from Ealing, London. Dear Mr. Townsend, I hope my unexpected letter finds yourself well. I am in my study on a cold January evening, but I'll wager that it's far colder in Indiana. I've enjoyed the fruits of your labor in regards to the art of historical cookery. For many years yet, haven't had the opportunity to write until now. Firstly, I would like to take this opportunity to express my admiration and gratitude for all that you do. Not only do you stoke the enthusiasm of thousands over the face of the earth, but the warmth exuded by yourself and everyone at Townsend's has truly helped me and my love through what has been a truly difficult year filled with some truly rare trials. I will admit great joy in being a seasoned gourmand and having recreated plates from as far back as ancient Rome. Working in the wine trade as I do, good will always be of great importance to me, something we share. In the spirit of gastronomic enthusiasm, allow me the pleasure of sharing a recipe that I have enjoyed and relished, Taggity Tart. The dish was originally from Robert May's 1660 book, The Accomplished Cook. However, for the sake of clarity, I have provided an updated version from the 1724 that is published in the Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary. I apologize for my boldness for the unsolicited letter, but in a year such as this one gone past, it's important to reach out to those who have made an impact. I hope you enjoy the tart, just a small treat from across the seas, yours respectfully, Tarek Khan. P.S. No matter how hard I search, there is nary a pocket nutmeg grater to be found in all of Britain. Alas, it seems my long search continues. And here's the recipe. It says a recipe for Tafferty Tarts from the Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary from 1724. Mix a quarter pack of fine flour with a pint of yeast and as much hot liquor as will make it into a stiff paste with two pounds of butter, the yolks of 12 eggs, and half a pound of fine sugar. Make it up into small balls and then roll it out into thick plates. Wash around their brims with milk. Boil pippins soft. Peel them. Scrape the pulp from the cores. Mingle the pulp with fine sugar, a little marmalade made of quinces, the scrapings of candied orange peel, and rose water. Make up your tarts. Dry them in a warm place. Bake them. Scrape sugar and sprinkle essence of violets over them and serve them up. This recipe sounds extremely doable. In fact, I think we have everything we need in the kitchen. Let's go and make it. So I'm working on this recipe. I've got all the ingredients here. But guess what? It's not quite as simple as that first reading. And I've got John Knott's dictionary here. And you know, I thought that this first section, really, this recipe is two parts. It's the paste and then it's the filling. And the filling is easy. I mean, it's applesauce, right? But the paste is the trick here. And as you're reading through it, it's just completely confusing. Mix a quarter of a peck of fine flour. And a peck in this time period might be 12 pounds. So we've got our flour and then we have a pint of yeast. And yeast in the time period is liquid yeast. So we've got liquid yeast and then as much hot liquor, meaning just hot water, as we'll make it into a stiff paste. So now we've got flour, yeast, and then water and it's making a stiff paste. Then we add two pounds of butter to make a paste when it's hot. And then eggs and sugar. Wait a minute. This starts to look like something else that we've done in the past. Probably two or three years ago, we did some cookery out of a French cookbook and what it was was a primitive choux paste. And that's what this is. So this is a very primitive version of it. It isn't made like we would make it today if you looked in a cookbook, but we'll make it happen. I think this is going to work out and I think it's going to make a very, very interesting kind of crust for this tart. This definitely isn't a tart crust you think it's going to be. Then we have the problem with the shaping of it. So we take the dough, we turn it into a ball, then we flatten it out into a plate. It doesn't really say what's going on here. So I was very, very confused about the presentation, what this is supposed to look like. So I went online and found a very, very interesting article by Mary Ann Borman, who has been chasing down Tafferty Tarts. So Tafferty Tarts are not just a 18th century thing. They go well into the 19th century and they go way back, Shakespearean times. So back hundreds of years and unless you go deep, deep, deep, it's really hard to understand what they're trying to do with this recipe. But her hint that I got out of there, if there's just one word, two words, two words to help you figure out what this is supposed to look like, pop tart. These are pop tarts of the 18th century. Once I knew exactly what, where we were going, ah, now this recipe falls into. Now let's get started. So we've got a pound of flour and we can just use any old all-purpose flour is going to do. And we're going to add in our yeast. And this recipe calls for liquid yeast of the time period. They didn't have sort of powdered yeast like we do today. Most people don't have access to liquid yeast, you know, yeast from the brewer, right? So we're just going to take regular old powdered yeast, put that with some water, let it set for a little while, 10, 15 minutes, just for it to, you know, kind of grow and get moisturized, I guess. Then it can go in and we need maybe a third of a packet in a couple of ounces of water. And we're going to mix that in with our flour real quick. And then the very counterintuitive, but the next part is the hot liquid. Now, obviously, if this is too much hot liquid, if it's too hot, it's going to kill all that yeast. I mean, what was the point of putting in the yeast? But yeah, we're going to put in some hot water. Not a lot. It says enough to make stiff paste. So I'm just going to pour in, I don't know, three, four ounces of hot water and mix that in until it's as much of a hard paste as we're going to get, right? Now it's very counterintuitive. How do we get our butter? How do we get our eggs? How do we get our sugar in here? Sugar is easy enough, but we need three egg yolks. And then we need our butter. It's like a half a pound of butter, eight ounces of butter. That's a lot of butter. That's a lot of eggs that we're adding a lot of liquid to this. And now when we mix it together, I'm just going to mix it with my hand. It's really when I mix this all together. Boy, it's too soft. It's too soft. It's not making a paste at all. It's making like a dough. So I'm going to keep adding a little bit more flour back to it until we get something that's a little bit more like paste. But this is going to be a very, very soft paste when we're done with it. So don't go too far with it. Don't turn it into something like pie crust. No, it's not going to be that hard, but it should give us a texture that is just totally different than a typical tart. I'm going to go ahead and set this dough aside for it to rest, and probably it's going to rise a little bit. It's got that yeast in there. There is the hint here in the recipe. It says, dry them in a warm place. So we do want them to do a little bit of something. So I'm just going to set that dough aside while we work on our apples. And it calls for pippins. Well, pippins are a particular apple in the 18th century. We don't know. I don't know exactly which kind. So we've got some nice sort of tart pie type apples, and we're just going to peel them, core them, and probably quarter them and put them in some nice boiling water so that they will get nice and soft. And we're going to make applesauce, basically. So we've got our dough. It looks great. We've got some fillings. We've got the applesauce sort of mixture here. We've got a little bit of marmalade, which they call for in the recipe. Also, candied orange peel. I do have some of the egg whites left over that we were using, but the egg yolks are just in here. I added a little bit of water to thin them out, and we have just a little bit of sugar. Let's start to form them up. We just take a little ball here, not too big. I'm going to roll it into the ball, as they suggest, and flatten it out. So we've got our cooking sheet here, and I'm just going to flatten this out into three, three and a half inches in diameter. Nice and thin. We can get this almost as thin as we like. These are supposed to work out nice and flat. We're going to take our finger and just sort of paint the very outside edge with the egg white mixture. This will just create a glue because we're going to put a top on this. Now it's time for the filling. I've got our little apple filling here, and these are, since they're supposed to be thin, we don't need to add a whole lot. We've got a little bit of marmalade, and I'm going to drop in the little pieces of candied orange peel. And they're fun because they add a little bit of texture compared to the marmalade and the applesauce sort of mixture. They'll give us a little bit of bite there. And again, since the recipe called for the putting the milk, or in this case egg white, around the outside edge, it's a hint that this gets a top to it. So we're just going to create exactly the same as we did for the bottom and set it down on top. We can do all sorts of fun, pretty things if we'd like. So we could put a braid on this. We can put little plates on it. We can take a fork and make little marks on it. That's all up to you. You can really have fun with, you know, the way they're going to look. If we want a sort of a frosted feel to them, especially they'll color up nicely when they bake, I'm going to take a little bit more of this egg white mixture. It's just egg whites and water. Put it on the top. Add just a touch of sugar. Then it's ready to go in the oven. And these bake 375. Really, it's kind of the best temperature. And 15 minutes, maybe 10, depends on how big yours are, but that's how long they go in. You'll know when you start to smell them and they look just right. You'll know. So our taffety tarts are out of the oven and they've cooled off. They're ready to try out, but they are beautiful, aren't they? They turned out really nice and they're light. They're easy. They're finger food. You can pick them up. And I want to see how this dough turned out in the eating. So that's going to be the interesting part for me. So let's try this one out. Take a look at that. So depending on how thin or thick you get these, and you really want to thin them out as much as possible. This one kind of puffed up. That's all right though, but you can see from the interior that they kind of turn out a little bit like bread because that yeast in there really starts to take off and do some really interesting things. So, you know, puff paste is not the same as what this kind of paste turns into. Super good flavors with whatever kind of filling you want to put in. If you do open face, you can experiment with colors and use different kinds of jams and preserves just like they did with this one. It's like, well, the apple turns out to be like a clear filling. If you want something to be other colors, you can use some marmalade. You can color it up with a cochineal if you wanted to. If you want to have red ones or different kinds of fruits, it's okay to have different kinds of fruits in here. Even though apple's one of the main ones that shows up in the earlier ones, other kinds of fruit shows up. So you can really have a lot of fun with how these end up looking. I really want to thank Tariq for the letter and the recipe. It's a really a great project to be able to interact with someone who sent us something, especially, you know, from overseas. We get a chance to try this out, kind of, you know, dig into a recipe that I may have never dug into. You know, over the years, there's so many pieces inside a book like this that you really need other people to say, hey, you know, you need to check this one out. So thank you so much, Tariq, for that. And just a fabulous recipe. Just a wonderful, very, very interesting sort of dough crust that you want to experiment with. So definitely recommend experimenting with this one, even though I'm sure some of the folks said, what is he doing? Why is he making the crust like this? It actually turns out very, very good. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you're interested in more interesting tarts and desserts from the 18th century, make sure to check out this link, and we'll see you over there. Thanks for watching.