A Simple Lemon Tart With Sensuous Surprises

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/magazine/simple-lemon-tart-sweet-crust-recipe.html

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Sometime during the first year that I was married, when I was teaching myself to cook, I enrolled in a cake-decorating class. A course on how not to turn steaks into hockey pucks might have been more useful at that stage of my life, but I was already in thrall to baking. I bought myself canvas pastry bags marked “Made in France” and outfitted them with a wardrobe of accessories. Each week, I would take my place in front of a ruled board, just as I had when I was learning cursive, and spend two hours squeezing Crisco (cheaper and more forgiving than frosting) into shapes that always fell short of botanical verisimilitude.

Eventually I developed a repertoire of pansies, ruffled leaves, shells, swags and roses, never perfect, but nonetheless a source of pride. An ambitious student, I also set myself the task of learning to construct the most complicated desserts in the French canon. I worked my way through the Parisian chef Gaston Lenôtre’s first English-language cookbook, and on any old Tuesday night, I’d serve a gâteau St. Honoré — puff pastry, cream puffs, two kinds of pastry cream and caramel, some spun. I was learning techniques that I would continue to build on, and I kept at it for a decade or so. Then came the great awakening: I caught myself soaking a dainty cake with rum syrup, layering it with coffee buttercream, frosting it, finishing it with piped rosettes ... and craving a shortbread cookie. I was creating beautiful desserts, but the more elaborate they were, the less I enjoyed eating them.

My tastes were changing. What I wanted was something trickier to achieve than a bouquet of sugar-paste flowers: simplicity. Like a minimalist architect, I began removing the superfluous and judging what I constructed on its bedrock elements. I always knew that dessert’s only purpose was pleasure. Now I wanted that pleasure to come from the ingredients and how I worked with them, the juxtapositions of texture, the combinations of flavors, the aromas that float into the kitchen when the oven door opens and vanish an instant later.

I haven’t entirely given up on the intricate confections of my early years. I still go over the top on birthday cakes — it’s my frosting loophole. And I often decorate my desserts, but I try to make sure that what’s outside is never more important than what’s within. The desserts I’ve come to value are unassuming, yet they slyly call you to attention. The texture of a well-made poundcake can pull you in like that. Cookies with intermittent crunch, ice cream with a hard-to-place spice, chocolate cakes with salt, classics resized or reshaped. They all have this power, but the exemplar might be the lemon tart that I’ve been baking for about 20 years.

Like the best simple desserts, this one is plain, built on unremarkable ingredients but reliant on each one of them. Nothing about its looks dazzles: It’s a crust and a pale-colored filling that might or might not have a few cracks on its surface. To me, there’s beauty in its homeliness.

The filling’s texture is enigmatic. It has the qualities that make spoon desserts so seductive: It cuts like pudding, clings tentatively to the knife like jam and gently shimmies like custard. It’s slow to melt in your mouth, a bit of unexpected sensuousness. And its flavor is bold. It’s exuberantly, sharply, unequivocally, edgily lemony, capturing the essence of the fruit because it uses every bit of it, peel, pith and pulp — only the seeds are left behind. It’s the surprise in this simple dessert. Alone, this mixture of lemon tempered by butter and sugar is good but incomplete. The crust is as vital to the recipe as the filling. It adds flavor and texture, balance and contrast; it rounds and finishes the dessert.

I like to use a sweet dough (almost a cookie dough), and I like to roll it a bit thicker than usual. A thin crust does a fine job of containing the filling, but a more substantial crust adds a definitive texture, creating a lively back-and-forth between its own snap and crumble and the filling’s creaminess. And if it’s baked well, to a deep color, then the crust will also have distinctive flavor — nutlike from the butter, which browns as it bakes, and caramel from the sugar. It will have a personality strong enough to be the filling’s true partner. And the tart will be perfectly balanced. My younger self would have tipped the scale and piped hillocks of cream over the top; my current self appreciates the impulse, prefers a dusting of powdered sugar and bows to the wisdom of less being immeasurably more.

Recipe: Whole Lemon Tart | Sweet Tart Crust