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Passionfruit tarts

Recipes from The Calendar of Cake and Afternoon Tea Delicacies: A recipe for each day of the year, 1933, by Dorothy C Hammond and published by the Country Women’s Association. 

Notes from cook Genevieve Freeman

At first glance, the modern cook will notice the distinct lack of instruction in the CWA recipes. Their assumed knowledge is vast. Most home cooks in 1933, the year of publication, would have known their stuff — CWA members’ baking skills are legendary. In their recipes, essential infomation like oven temperatures and cooking times are left to the experienced CWA cook to work out. Modern cooks are used to cookbooks with step-by-step pictures, conversion guides and so on. They need more reassurance and have more questions: What variety of passionfruit do I use? How big should the eggs be? What type of sugar? What is the cooking duration? What does baking tart shells blind mean? How many portions does this recipe make?

All pastry baking is chemistry. Get the balance wrong and it can be a catastrophe. But it is always fun and the results of this three-step recipe were definitely worth the effort. I’d love to try more recipes from this calendar of baking classics.

I doubled the pastry recipe (12 September), and it was far too wet to be able to roll with its equal ratio of flour to butter and an egg as well. I may have made the fatal mistake of using too-warm butter but, again, ice-cold butter is a baker’s trick that the CWA assumes its readers know about. I compensated by leaving out an egg in my doubled recipe, adding more flour to bring it to the right consistency and chilling the pastry before rolling it out.

I tweaked the passionfruit filling recipe (6 December) as well. Perhaps modern passionfruits are larger and juicier? I ended up adding a slurry of 1 teaspoon of cornflour because the egg yolk was not enough to thicken the mix. A foolproof test is to put a teaspoon of the filling on a plate and put in the freezer to see if it sets.

The best meringue is made from old egg whites because the albumen is broken down. Add the caster sugar very gradually after peaks have formed so you can build on the volume.


See a selection of CWA recipe books on display in our Amaze Gallery.

This recipe appears in Openbook winter 2022.