Apples and Oranges

These apple tarts are adapted from the Good Huswifes Jewell (1596):

To bake Quinces, Peares and Wardens.
 Take and pare and coare them, then make your paste with faire water and butter, and the yolke of an egge, then set your Oringes into the paste, and then bake it well, fill your paste almost full with Sinamon, Ginger and Suger.

Also Apples must be taken after the same sorte, saving that whereas the core should be cut out they must be filled with Butter every one, the hardest Apples are best, and likewise are Peares and Wardens, and none of them all but the wardens may be perboyled, and the Oven must be of a temperate heat, two houres to stand is enough.

I also preserved oranges using sugar syrop, and some by another, fairly complicated and obscure recipe (for preserving them whole) from the same manuscript. Then, with these oranges and some apples, I made a tart following a recipe from the Good Huswifes Handmaid for Cookery in her Kitchin (1588):

For a tarte of apples and orange pilles.

 Take your orenges and lay them in water a day and a night, then seeth them in faire water and honey and let seeth till they be soft; then let them soak in the sirrop a day and a night: then take forth and cut them small and then make your tart and season your apples with suger, synamon and ginger and put in a piece of butter and lay a course of apples and between the same course of apples a course of orenges, and so, course by course, and season your orenges as you seasoned your apples with somewhat more sugar; then lay on the lid and put it in the oven and when it is almost baked, take Rosewater and sugar and boyle them together till it be somewhat thick, then take out the Tart and take a feather and spread the rosewater and sugar on the lid and let it not burn.

I glazed it with Rose Water Syrop boiled to almost a hard ball stage, which made almost a candy like topping. Everyone who helped taste-test it said it was sooooo good!