What the heck is a Tudor Strawberry Tart? Well, it’s a strawberry tart made from a Tudor-era recipe. But why? I’ve recently become obsessed with a new youtube channel called ‘Tasting History‘ Every episode the host, Max, re-creates some recipe from the past and gives a history lesson related to the food and the period it’s from.
I decided to try a recipe from an episode, and the Tudor Strawberry Tart episode seemed perfect.
Along with making the tart, Max tells the story of how the modern strawberry we all know and love accidentally evolved from the wild strawberry. It’s surprisingly interesting.
Let’s address the elephant in the room.. What are those.. things.. on the surface? They are little pockets of melted butter. The recipe for the tart calls for 2 Tbsp of butter to be added as the last ingredient. He said not to worry about mixing the butter in too much because it would just melt in. Well, I think my butter (out of the fridge) was a combination of too cold and not cut up small enough, so I ended up with little pools of butter instead of the butter getting fully incorporated. The good news is, other than looking a little ugly it didn’t seem to affect the tart at all.
The filling is made from very simple ingredients – Strawberries, egg yolks, sugar, butter and bread crumbs. Yes, bread crumbs seem odd, but I imagine it was a combination of strawberries being very expensive and luxurious, and a need for something to bind and thicken the filling that led to using them. I happened to have some stale bread in my freezer, so I used that to make my own bread crumbs in the food processor.
I was concerned that the texture of the Tudor strawberry tart would be weird given the breadcrumbs, but it was pretty nice. It looks gritty/lumpy-er than it actually was when you ate it. The flavor was nice too. It sounds silly to say, but it was really strawberry forward, tasting more strawberry-ey than your average strawberry pastry. I guess the complete simplicity of the recipe really allows the flavor of the actual berries to shine. I’d probably make this again, and I will definitely be trying more recipes from the series.
