Recipe of the month: Tarte Tatin [fr]

Hello to all!

This month, the Centre-Cal de Loire region is honored with a great classic of the traditional regional cuisine that we all know, generous, delicate, tasty, simple to make, a treat for young and old: "the Tarte Tatin".

Tarte Tatin

It is an upside down tart with caramelized apples, eaten warm with thick cream. Legend has it that it was a chance discovery by the Tatin sisters, but some say that this story is fabricated. I leave it up to you to decide, but for my part, I like this story.

The "tourte retournée" is first mentioned in 1790. In 1906, La Tradition: revue générale des contes, légendes quotes: "When it happens that, of two sisters, the younger one marries before her elder, one makes her eat pie turned upside down, hence the following expression: ’To whom they made eat an upside down pie’".

The Hotel Tatin, in front of a train station, was frequented by many hunters. Legend has it that one Sunday after the opening of the hunting season, while preparing an apple pie for a hunters’ meal, Stéphanie, in the heat of the moment, forgot to put the pastry in the pan and simply put it in the oven with the apples. Realizing her mistake, she decided to simply add the pastry on top of the apples and bake the pie that way.

By the end of the 19th century, the pie made by the sisters Stéphanie (1838-1917) and Caroline Tatin (1847-1911), hoteliers in Lamotte-Beuvron in the Sologne region, was famous throughout the entire area. A manuscript of a teacher named Marie Souchon indicates that they got the recipe from the anonymous cook of Count Alfred Leblanc de Chatauvillard.

Marie Souchon’s recipe was published, apparently for the first time, in 1921 by the Solognot poet Paul Besnard in a local magazine Blois et le Loir-et-Cher with the requirement that a copper dish be used. The recipe appeared in Le Livret d’or de la section gastronomique régionaliste du Salon d’automne of 1923 under the direction of Austin de Croze, with the title Recette solognote: Tarte des Demoiselles Tatin, de Lamotte-Beuvron. It was reprinted with the same title, in December of the same year, in Commedia, without a signature but again with the same insistence on the obligation to use a copper dish. Then, it appeared in La France gastronomique - L’Orléanais (1926) by Curnonsky and Marcel Rouff.

To make the pie, you need apples with firm flesh that hold up well to cooking. The best apples are the Reinettes clochards, the Reinettes or the Goldens, but also the Boskoops or the Calvilles. The pastry can be flaky, shortbread or shortcrust.

Today I then suggest you try this very easy to make recipe, which requires few ingredients.

Bon Appétit !

Recipe for 8 people:

Ingredients:

• 150g + 300g of powdered sugar
• 8 large apples (here Goldens)
• 300g of soft butter
• 300ml of water
• 2 vanilla pods
• 1 puff pastry

Steps:

1. Start by caramelizing 150g of sugar. To do this, place it in a wide-bottomed saucepan over medium heat without stirring. Do not start stirring until the sugar begins to melt.
2. Wash and peel the apples. Cut them into quarters and remove the core and seeds. Open the vanilla pods in half and scrape out the seeds. Place them in a large saucepan with the butter, the remaining 300g of sugar and the water. Heat up.
3. Once the mixture is completely melted, add half of the apples and cook for about 10 minutes. The apples should be melting, you should be able to easily push a knife blade into them (but be careful not to mashed potato them!).
4. Take the apples out of the pan and cook the remaining apples.
5. Preheat oven to 180°C.
6. Cut the puff pastry to the size of your pan, using the pan as a cookie cutter. Prick the pastry with a fork.
7. Place the apples in the bottom of the pan, on top of the hardened caramel. Don’t be afraid to pack them in! Ideally, you should let them sit in the fridge overnight to settle (Oh well, who has the strength of character to wait that long to get into this pie? Not me anyway!).


8. Place the puff pastry over the apples and bake for 35 minutes.
9. Let the pie cool down a little before unmolding. However, the Tarte Tatin is even better warm, so don’t wait too long! You can of course reheat it.

On December 18, 1899, the Parisian daily newspaper Le Journal reported on its front page the introduction of the famous pie at the end of the meal:

"The diapason rises, bursts, fills the clear room, until, in the midst of the general joy and to the commotion of the satisfied, but not satiated, stomachs, appears, at the fingertips of the servant, Miss Tatin’s pie. The Bourgogne wine has circulated; the brains are light and the souls communicative. A cry of satisfaction comes from all the chests, a joy of the eyes goes in front of the triumphal cake. It is cut, served, swallowed."