A tart with a heart but no history
Growing up and going to school in Kent in the ‘90s, every Wednesday lunch finished with a slice of a saccharine slice of joy they called Gypsy Tart, a teeth-numbing tart made with muscovado sugar and evaporated milk and served with a bright green Granny Smith apple. “In order that we continue to enjoy Gypsy tart each week,” the teacher on duty would announce with much pomp and ceremony, “the apple must be eaten after the tart.” It was a public health announcement more than anything else, surely designed to save our teeth as much as anything, but one that imbued the occasion with a heightened sense of culinary experience to boot.
Let’s start with the name though. It’s not right, or polite, and we certainly know better than to use that word to describe anyone anymore, but thus far this tart just doesn't have any other name to go by. No one really knows where the tart came from, and no one outside of a small slice of East Kent really eats it. Although we should know more about it, and more people should eat it, and so I’m going to make a case for its appeal.
Wednesday was my favourite day at school. I never queried this wonderful tart’s origin, nor its popularity outside of my school gates. I simply lapped it up week in and week out. And then, when I ran my own restaurant kitchen 20 years later, I put this tart on the menu. I remembered it as delicious, for a start, and had a heady dose of British nostalgia too, but in the menu tasting at the beginning of that week, there was uproar and threats of mutiny from the front-of-house team: how dare we used a derogatory slur on the dessert menu, and who would order such a horribly sweet tart anyway?
Taken aback, I turned to the internet to prove that I hadn’t intended to be cruel, I was sharing a piece of childhood nostalgia with our customers. Nothing. This beloved tart has no discernable history to save my blushes.
A short Wikipedia entry alludes to a woman creating the tart out of the only things she had in her cupboard to feed hungry traveller kids loitering about in front of her house, but this felt too much like a retrofit, too much of a local folklore. Keen to better understand the tart, and my own history, I reach out to the cook from the junior school I attended and she tells me that she was told that traveller families passing through Kent used to sell this little tart as they moved around. The recipe they used at school, she seemed to recall, came from a friend of a friend of one of the cooks who perhaps just might have had traveller roots. She’s unsure though and suggests that in reality, it’s just part of the school food repertoire, it just got made week in, week out, much like the shepherds’ pie and the sausages with lumpy mash that might have preceded it each week.
Taking matters into my own hands I venture to Crusties, a family-run bakery that proudly boasts of selling over 12 million of these mystical tarts since they started baking 25 years ago. They sell almost exclusively in Kent, proof alone that this hyper-local treat still has the hearts of those in the know.
Michael, or Mr Crustie as he is known, corroborates the tale of a kooky old woman who was worried about hungry-looking kids playing in the street outside her house. As legend has it she didn’t have much, but she made this tart from what she did have in her pantry. I am desperate to know the recipe.
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