The Indian name for a Seville orange is, apparently, ‘narayam’ which means ‘perfume within’. You’ve got to love that. Arab traders are thought to have brought them to Europe and groves were established around Seville in Andalusia, which is how they come by their name.
They arrived in Britain centuries before their sweeter cousins and there are any number of fun things you can do with them apart from making marmalade.
I found this recipe in Sara Paston-Williams’s book on ‘Puddings’ for the National Trust. I don’t make it often, but that’s one of the things I particularly like about it. There’s something appealing about a truly seasonal fruit.
It starts with a sweet pastry case. ‘Sweet’ is a good idea here because the Seville orange is a bitter fruit. It’s a little tricky to handle, but worth the effort.
Sieve the flour, salt and icing sugar together. At this point, you have a choice. You could place the bowl in a chest freezer with a view to blitzing the lot together in the food processor. This will be a more attractive option if your freezer isn’t housed in an outbuilding at the end of the garden. In my case, I don’t have that excuse but I do have an almost pathelogical dislike of cleaning the blasted food processor …
So, assuming you are going to do as I do.
Rub the butter into the flour and icing sugar.
Whichever method you’ve opted for you need to separate two eggs.
Save the egg whites for the filling and use the yolks for the pastry.
I lightly beat the egg yolks and, using a blunt knife to mix, add them to the butter/flour/icing sugar.
The food processor method is to place the now super-cold contents of your bowl into the mixer. Pulse. Then add the egg yolks. Pulse again.
Whatever route you’ve taken you will end up with a soft dough. Knead briefly and wrap in cling film. Pop it into the fridge. There really is no skipping this stage. Give it time. 30 minutes minimum. Overnight is fine.
I like to melt butter to grease my 23cm/9″ flan tin and let that chill in the fridge too.
Before you take the pastry dough out of the fridge, get your oven up to temperature. 200ºF/400ºC/Gas Mark 6.
It really is worth rolling out between two sheets of cling wrap as it makes it so much easier to handle.
Remove the top sheet of cling film and transfer the pastry to the greased flan tin.
This feels counter intuitive to me but, as long as you are using cling film and not food wrap, there’s no need to peel the final sheet of cling film off the pastry. You’ll be glad of that! The pastry softens really quickly. Pour in your baking beans. Take care to bank them up against the sides of the tin.
There’s an alternative here, too. The pastry is so soft the baking beans will leave indentations. If that’s a problem to you, use flour instead of the beans.
Ten minutes later, it looks like this.
Remove the cling film and the beans, control your panic over how greasy it looks. This is because this pastry has a seriously high butter content. Return it to the oven to cook for a further ten minutes.
You’re not looking for the pastry case to have any colour. Cut away the excess pastry to give a neat finish.
Now it’s on to the filling. Spot the madeira cake! Whiz the cake slice into crumbs. Reduce the oven temperature to 180ºC/350ºF/Gas Mark 4.
If you’re unsure whether your Seville Oranges are waxed, you’ll need to run under boiling water and give them a scrub. (I wish they’d stop doing that.) Weigh out 55g/2oz caster sugar and add the zest of both your oranges.
Mix together.
Warm the single cream (or full-fat milk if you’re feeling sanctimonious) and add that together with the cake crumbs and cubed butter. Stir until the butter has melted in the warmed cream.
Add the egg yolks and the juice of both the Seville Oranges.
Whisk the egg whites until it stands in soft peaks.
Fold the egg whites into the orange mixture. Think soufflé and be gentle.
Scoop the filling into the pastry case and bake for 30 minutes until the top is golden brown.
Warm or cold.
Serve with cold cream.
Eat.
Seville Orange Tart
(discovered in Sara Paston-Williams ‘Good Old-Fashioned Puddings’ for the National Trust.
23cm/9″ flan tin.
For the Pastry:
175g/6oz plain flour
pinch of salt
85g/3oz icing sugar
150g/5½oz unsalted butter, cubed
2 egg yolks, beaten
Sieve the flour, salt and icing sugar into a bowl and rub in the butter.
Mix in the egg yolks to form a soft dough. Wrap in cling film and chill for a minimum of 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven. Grease the flan tin with butter.
Roll out the pastry between two sheets of cling film. Remove the top sheet and flip the pastry into the flan tin. Leaving the remaining cling film sheet in place, lightly press the pastry against the sides and leave the overhanging pastry. Fill with baking beans.
Bake ‘blind’ for 10 minutes.
Remove the beans and cling film and return to the oven for a further 10 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 180ºC/350ºF/Gas Mark 4.
For the Filling:
Zest and juice of 2 Seville Oranges
55g/2oz caster sugar
55g/2oz Madeira Cake Crumbs
25g/1oz butter, cut into small pieces
150ml/¼ pint single cream or full-fat milk
2 egg, separated
Mix the caster sugar with the orange zest, then add the butter and cake crumbs.
Warm the cream and pour over the mixture. Stir until the butter has melted. Add the egg yolks and the orange juice.
Whisk the egg whites until they reach the ‘soft peak’ stage, then fold into the orange mixture.
Transfer to the pastry case and cook for 30 minutes, or until the filling is golden brown.
This weekend was all about family – and food. We had a big get-together. Nigel and I loved watching our five meeting up with their third cousins. That’s kind of special, isn’t it?
It begins with my Grandma ‘Dowton’ who, during the Second World War, took in the two children of one of her brothers. My Grandad always said he went to war with two children and came home to four. Of those four children it’s just my mum, the youngest, who is missing.
During my childhood whenever my mum asked what she should bring ‘food-wise’ to anything – the answer was invariably ‘Lemon Meringue’. She made the best and got thoroughly fed up with making them! So, in full nostalgia mode, I’ve been making Lemon Meringue Pie.
Naturally, as soon as I had my own kitchen, I tried to out-do her. Over the years I’ve tried adding orange juice for colour, messed about with the pastry (egg yolk, icing sugar ..), tried Italian meringue for the topping … and have given up. Her recipe is a piece of genius – and I have it. It’s in the neatly typed up, tucked in ‘wipeable’ plastic pockets and clipped into the ‘Sweet’ recipe lever-file she left me when she died.
I was expecting it would be time consuming to discover where she found it, but no. There it was on a food splattered page in a battered copy of ‘The Cookery Year’, published by Readers’ Digest in 1973. We have both changed one thing, I realise. There’s no margarine in our pastry! (For those in the UK, my mum was an ‘Anchor and Cookeen’ girl and I’m definitely a ‘Lurpak and Trex’ one.)
What my mum particularly liked about this recipe was that it only uses one lemon. Now, for all I’m living in ‘austerity Britain’, I’m prepared to give any pie two lemons if needed. But it doesn’t. Really.
You begin with the pastry. There’s a whole heap of nonsense talked about making pastry, but there are really only two secrets to the business. The first, don’t over-handle it. The second, don’t skip the chilling. That said, put a glass of tap water in the fridge. Minimal effort, I feel.
Sift your flour and salt into a large bowl. (It always confused me when recipes said that because the salt never does entirely go through the holes, does it? What you’re doing is adding air if your flour has compacted in the bag and getting the salt dispersed evenly through it. What’s left in the sieve, you can just add!)
Then add the fat, cut into smallish cubes. I’m using a mixture of butter and vegetable shortening – a balance between butter for taste and lard for flakiness. You don’t want soft fats (that makes pastry difficult to work with), but you don’t want fridge hard either. Trying to ‘rub in’ icy little cubes isn’t much fun.
What you’re actually doing by ‘rubbing in’ is coating tiny bits of flour with fat – before you add any liquid. Think of it like a raincoat! It’s to stop liquid penetrating the flour. Liquid + flour = gluten proteins. And gluten proteins give you tough pastry. Roughly!! You can do the whole thing in a food processor, but it’s so easy to do it by hand and who likes washing up???
So clean hands, not cold. Butter and vegetable shortening cut into smallish cubes, at squeezable temperature.
Then it is this! (My first YouTube video. Am feeling disproportionately proud ..!!)
Stop when it looks like this. Breadcrumbs – ish. There are still little lumps of fat, but that doesn’t matter. This is the bit where you get better results if you don’t ‘over-work’ it. Light and cool is the mantra!
Retrieve the water from the fridge. How much you’ll need will depend on the absorbency of your flour and the weather. Annoying, I know. But – you can always add more … so start with a couple of tablespoons and try and sprinkle it over the entire surface. Then take a blunt knife and mix. Light touch rather than bingo wing work-out. Stop when it starts to form clumps.
Bring it together into a ball with your hand until it leaves the sides of the bowl clean. You are now done with the bowl.
On your worktop give the pastry a little knead. (Yes, really.) You want it free of cracks and smooth.
-If you’ve made a mistake with the water and the pastry is crumbling beneath your fingers – run your hands under the cold tap and lightly knead in the water on your hands.
-If it’s too wet you’ll have to sprinkle flour on your worktop. Go careful because you are altering the fat/flour ratio.
Form it into a flat disc and wrap in plastic cling. The flat is important. If you chill it as a ball the outside will come back to room temperature much quicker than the centre and you’ll struggle to roll it later. Put it – and the flan tin (why not?) – in the fridge. Chill for a minimum of 30 minutes. Longer is absolutely fine …
But assuming you are going to push on … turn on your oven to heat up to Gas Mark 6 or 400°F. Take the 7″/18cm flan tin from the fridge and grease it well. I brush melted butter on mine. My mum used old butter wrappers. Then return it to the fridge.
Now it’s the lemony filling. Peel your lemon.
If you’ve got any pith (the white part) on your peel, get rid of it. It’s bitter.
Pop it into a saucepan with the water and granulated sugar. Keep the heat low until the sugar has dissolved, then turn it up and bring to a boil. When it’s reached boiling point, turn off the heat.
Meanwhile … squeeze the lemon.
You get more juice from a warm lemon so roll it on the your work-surface a few times. (I pop it in the Warming Oven of my Aga.) Assuming you don’t have the biceps of a chef and/or an appropriate gadget you can get much more juice by squeezing with your kitchen tongs.
Put 3 tablespoons of lemon juice in a large bowl and mix together with 2 level tablespoons of cornflour. (Australian cooks – see note at the bottom as your tablespoons measure differently from mine.)
Pour the hot sugar syrup through a sieve into the cornflour and lemon juice mix and stir.
Now it’s the eggs. The colour of your egg yolks will determine how strong a colour your lemony layer has. Separate the yolks from the whites. This is one way, using your fingers as a sieve. (Feels quite nice!)
Or you tip the yolk from one half of the shell to the other. (Less messy!)
If any of the shell drops into the whites you do need to get it out. By far the easiest way is to lower an empty shell half into the bowl and, magically, the stray piece will be drawn back.
The sugar syrup, lemon juice and cornflour mixture now needs to go back into the saucepan. Add the egg yolks, one at a time, and stir. Then a knob of butter. Stir.
Turn on the heat and, without letting it boil, stir until it is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. This can sometimes take a while. Just keep going. It will thicken. Turn off the heat.
Now back to the pastry.
I tend to roll out my pastry between two sheets of plastic cling. Originally I did it because I had the tiniest work area you could imagine and got fed up with moving all the jars I had stored at the back of the counter top. Years later I saw TV chef Rachel Allen do the same thing and discovered I was more intelligent than I’d realised – by using cling wrap you avoid the need for additional flour which keeps your pastry exactly to the ratio you intended!!
If you’ve gone for the cling wrap method, peel back the top sheet and you’ll find it easy to lift over the top of your flan tin. Otherwise, you gently fold the pastry over your rolling pin and lift over the top of the tin. Push down into the tin and don’t forget the edges.
Pass the rolling pin across the top of the flan tip and remove the excess pastry. (Don’t throw it away. Wrap it up and put it back in the fridge.)
Gently push the pastry against the sides of the tin. Often there is a little shrinkage so I bring the pastry just slightly above the sides of the tin. Then scrunch up a square of greaseproof paper and place on top of the uncooked pastry case. Fill to the top with dried beans, so the sides are supported while the pastry is cooking.
This is ‘baking blind’. Place in the oven. After 15 minutes remove the paper and beans and return for an additional 5 minutes. (Keep the beans. Once they’re cool, put them in a jar, label, and they’re ready for the next time.)
Give it 5 minutes.
Then take it out of the flan ring. I tend to use a larger, 30 cm, flan tin base and slide it between the pastry case and the base. Already you have your pastry case on something you can return to the oven. Otherwise, place the pastry case on a baking tray.
Sieve the cooling lemony mixture into the pastry case. (It’s really worth sieving because you’ll catch the white membrane which held the white to yolk and have a lovely smooth sauce. I made two pies – and that is four eggs worth of debris.)
This is a break point, if you want one.
Some recipes reckon you need the liquid hot to cook the underside of the meringue. Some state you need to chill. Some have a seamless progression of stages ….
This recipe is written as a seamless process, and it works just fine. If you are doing that, turn the oven down to Gas Mark 2/300°F.
I often chill. The optimum serving temperature is ‘warm’ and if there are other things going on it makes the whole thing so much simpler if you have the lemony pie base sitting in the fridge just waiting for the meringue top …
The two egg whites need to go into a scrupulously clean bowl. Whisk until it’s stiff. Add half the caster sugar and whisk again until it’s smooth and shiny and holds its shape. Tip in all but a dessertspoon of the caster sugar and gently fold in.
This next part is slightly easier if you’ve chilled the mixture. Gently spread the meringue over the top of the lemony mixture, starting at the sides and spreading to the middle. Make sure the meringue touches the pastry sides as that will make a seal and prevent any weeping.
Sprinkle over the remaining caster sugar and immediately put it back into the now cooler oven for 25-30 minutes.
When the meringue is crisp, it’s ready. Leave until warm. Eat.
‘Cold’ might not be perfection, but it is still worth the calories!
And that left-over pastry ..
Use it to line a 12 bun tin/12 patty tin. Either freeze for later. Or make jam tarts or mini lemon meringue pies now …! The first pastry rolling will always be the flakiest, but the second is still good. Roll evenly – and try not to stretch it.
Traditional Shortcrust Pastry – Makes 8oz/225g shortcrust pastry
(Isn’t that ‘half fat to flour’ Imperial ratio easy to remember! I flick the switch on my scales.)
8 oz/225g plain flour
½ level teaspoon fine sea-salt
2 oz/55g lard
2 oz/55g unsalted butter
2-3 tablespoons of cold water
Sift the flour and salt into a large bowl. Add the butter and lard and ‘rub in’ until you have something approaching fine breadcrumbs. Keep it all light.
Sprinkle the water over and mix the dough with a round bladed knife until it starts to form lumps. Bring together to form a ball. Lightly knead until it is smooth and flatten into a disc. Chill for a minimum of 30 minutes.
Roll out the pastry in even strokes and line a 7″/18cm flan tin and bake ‘blind’ for about 15-20 minutes, until the pastry is golden. Leave to cool and then remove from the tin. Place on a baking sheet.
Reduce the oven temperature to Gas Mark 2.
Peel the rind from the lemon, ensuring there is no white pith. Squeeze the juice from the lemon and put 3 tablespoons in a large bowl.
Put the lemon peel, granulated sugar and ½ pint/300ml water. Cook over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved, then bring up to a boil. Remove from the heat.
Blend 2 tablespoons of cornflour with the lemon juice in the bowl. Pouring through a sieve, add the sugar syrup. Stir.
Separate the eggs. One at a time, beat in the egg yolks and the butter. Return to the saucepan and heat until thickened. It’s ready when it’s thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon.
Pour the lemony mixture through a sieve into the cooked pastry case. Cool.
Whisk the egg whites until stiff and then add half of the caster sugar. Whisk again until the meringue is shiny and holds its shape. Fold in the remaining sugar leaving a little to sprinkle over the top.
Pile the meringue over the top, spreading from the sides to the middle and making sure the meringue makes a firm seal with the pastry case.
Sprinkle over the remaining caster sugar.
Bake the Lemon Meringue Pie for 30 minutes, or until the top is crisp. Best served warm.
Seville Orange Tart
