This is refreshingly simple the vast majority of Gypsy tart fillings contain just two ingredients: sugar and evaporated milk. Paul Hollywood adds condensed milk to his filling. You’ll need to blind bake the tart case thoroughly, because the filling requires a very gentle hand with the heat – again, it’s nice to have some textural difference between the two elements of the dish. They’re not obligatory, but they are very welcome. To be honest, not being a Michelin-style perfectionist, I’m not sure I can appreciate the difference, glorious as his pastry is – unlike the almonds in Birkett’s recipe, which highlight the contrast between crisp crust and wobbly filling. Harris’s version calls for low-gluten flour, for which I use sponge flour, and he lines the tin with pastry discs, rather than rolling it out, to minimise gluten development. Bake Off winner Jo Wheatley goes as far as adding lemon juice and zest to the recipe in her book Home Baking, giving her shortcrust a real tang – we’re divided as to whether this is a distraction or an improvement, but it’s certainly a clever idea. That said, given the aggressive sweetness of the filling, we all tend towards the plainer pastry used by Birkett and Gary Rhodes.
It’s quite different from all the others, which tend to be rich and biscuity – Stephen Harris’s recipe from the aforementioned Sportsman is so delicious that I’m tempted to bake the leftovers as shortbread. Jo Wheatley adds lemon juice and zest to her pastry. “Unnecessary” is a good word for Gypsy tart: no one needs a brown-sugar mousse in a buttery pastry case – but I bet you want one now, don’t you? The pastryīirkett explains that it wasn’t the sugar that troubled her as a child: “Given that we lived off Refresher bars and pink sugar shrimps from the tuck shop at school, the amount of sugar going on in these tarts never seemed outrageous at the time, but I always found the pastry a bit soft, flabby and insipid.” She’s working on a recipe with a nutty spelt pastry that she kindly sends me to try out, crunchy with chopped almonds and emphatically savoury from the spelt. There was something utterly irresistible about the sweet, soft, moussey filling, often topped by completely unnecessary, but nicely crunchy, beige sprinkles.” Kent-born food writer Rosie Birkett, whose new book The Joyful Home Cook is out in May, says: “It always felt like a real treat as kids.
Chef Mark Sargeant recalls it being served up “every lunchtime” during his schooldays in Maidstone, yet, he observes sadly, “people who aren’t from our area never seem to have heard of it”.
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