BOGBERRY TART
A 14th Century recipe for Canelyn pie, from the tale of Gawain and the Green Knight, uses bogberries as a flavorful contrast to the heaviness of the holiday food. Bogberries are small tart fruits in the same family as blueberries, bilberries, cranberries, cloud berries and lingonberries. The Medieval Canelyn pie was heavy on beef and had a traditional lard pie crust top. This recipe has a more delicate top and no meat but, remarkably, many of the other ingredients and flavors stayed very much the same. This delicious Bogberry Tart is based on one found in a New England regional cookbook—and uses the local bogberries, red cranberries, with the same spices as its Medieval forebear.
- 2 cups cranberries—plus ¼ cup sugar
- 6 apples, peeled, cored and sliced—plus ¼ cup sugar
- Warm spices to taste—cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, ginger
- 1 tblsp lemon juice
- 1 tblsp cornstarch
Batter:
- ½ cup dark brown sugar
- ½ cup white sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla
- ½ cup melted butter
- 1 cup flour
Prepare fruit:
Wash 2 cups of cranberries and combine with ¼ cup water and ¼cup sugar. Turn on high, stir frequently—when berries start to burst, boil for almost a minute to soften berries. Set aside to cool. Prepare apples. They can be mixed with the sugar, lemon, and warm spices and used as is. This recipe sautés the sliced apples with the other ingredients, plus 1 tblsp of butter—stirring frequently, for about 5 minutes. Set aside to cool. For either apple prep, finish by adding 1 tblsp cornstarch and mix well.
Prepare topping:
Melt 1 stick butter. Using pastry brush, thoroughly butter a 9 or 10” pie pan. Whisk the eggs, then add both sugars, vanilla, melted butter and flour. Whisk until batter is smooth. In pie pan, set apples and cranberries in 5 thin layers, starting and ending with apples. Add any juice from apples, and up to 2 tblsp syrup from cranberries. Pour batter over the fruit and smooth top evenly. Bake in a preheated 325’ oven for 50-60 minutes. Tart is done when knife inserted in center of batter comes out dry, or just barely sticky. Top should be nicely browned. Serve warm with a scoop of ice cream.
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