Britain and Ireland · Volume 32, The Mill, the Pie and the Steel Pan
Yorkshire Curd Tart
Yorkshire
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 30 minutes
- Researched
- No outside sources linked
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Curd cheese, a soft, unsalted, mild fresh cheese, is essential and not interchangeable with cottage cheese's larger, tangier curds, a substitution every source consulted in researching this chapter explicitly warns against. The dish is traditionally dated to the early to mid seventeenth century, tied to Whitsuntide and the surplus curds left over from Yorkshire's own extensive cheesemaking tradition, though a possible medieval precursor exists in a fourteenth century curd tart recipe, flavoured with elderflower and rosewater, in the royal cookery manuscript The Forme of Cury.
As tradition built it
Serves 8. 25 to 30 minutes, plus blind baking and cooling.
Ingredients
- 1 10 inch shortcrust pastry case, blind baked
- 125g salted butter
- 60g caster sugar
- 250g curd cheese
- 125g currants (not raisins)
- a pinch a pinch of salt
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 1/4 to 1/2 tsp ground allspice
- 1 tsp rosewater, if using
Method
- Blind bake the pastry case.
- Cream the butter with the caster sugar, then beat in the curd cheese, currants, salt and beaten eggs.
- Season with the ground allspice, and the rosewater if using.
- Pour into the pastry case and bake at 220°C for 25 to 30 minutes, then cool on a rack and serve at room temperature rather than hot.
What a modern chef changes
A house-cultured curd, and fresh-ground allspice in place of the jar
Kit note, not tied to a numbered rung.
Method
- Make the curd cheese in-house rather than buying it: culture whole milk gently, then drain it through muslin set in a chinois for several hours, controlling the final moisture content far more precisely than a shop-bought curd allows, and giving a cleaner, fresher dairy flavour than a curd of unknown age.
- Grind fresh allspice berries in a dedicated spice grinder immediately before use rather than using pre-ground spice, for a sharper, more genuinely aromatic lift.
- Bake the tart in a Big Green Egg run at a controlled, even indirect heat rather than a domestic oven, for a more consistent set across the whole tart than an oven's uneven heat distribution typically gives a shallow custard-based filling like this one.