No Yorkshire recipe collection would be complete without a curd tart for pud.
This recipe was kindly sent in by Tracy Little, of the Swaledale Museum. It was amongst the papers from the Millennium Exhibition at Reeth Memorial Hall.
Rather than transcribe it, we preferred to keep it in its original handwritten form. If anyone out there recalls submitting it, or recognises the handwriting, then let us know!
And one important note on the recipe: “the rum should be omitted if the tart is for Chapel Tea”.
If anyone makes this one, please can they email me a photo of the finished product to add to the recipe? Use the contact details on the website.
I had a go at making this using my own homemade curds. You can use different methods to make curds by adding one of lemon juice, vinegar, epsom salts, rennet, eggs or buttermilk to heated milk. I followed the recipe in Yorkshire Cookery: Recipes collected by Mrs Appleby and heated some whole milk to almost boiling and then added 4 tablespoons of lemon juice to curdle the milk and cooked it for another 6 minutes to make it firmer. I then strained it through a jelly bag to leave firm curds and used the remaining whey to make cheese scones.
It made a lovely deep and moist tart. Not having rum in the house, I made the chapel tea version ( ie without alcohol) and felt it might have benefited from a little additional something such as lemon juice.
Although not specified, I think I would also blind bake the pastry case – my tart suffered a little from the proverbial “soggy bottom”.
But I had great fun baking it and even more fun eating it!
Thanks for the photo Margaret, looks lovely! We’re planning on trying out the cottage-cheese approach.
…and I can confirm it works very well with cottage cheese. Given Margaret’s comment above (and since we didn’t have any rum in the house), I also added a tsp of vanilla essence, which worked well to give it some flavour.