R E C I P E S
La Tarte à la Raisinée
The Classic Intense Apple Dessert from the Vaud in Switzerland
By Edward Behr
This markedly flavorful and delicious tart mixes cream with raisinée and egg to make a form of flan. Raisinée is sweet apple or pear juice, or a combination, according to the trees you have, boiled down to a dark, thick, tangy syrup. The substance and the recipe come from the Swiss canton of Vaud, which runs from lakes Léman and Neuchâtel up into the mountains on the French border. (In purely apple form, as “boiled cider,” the syrup is also made in the northern US, where it is undergoing a small revival; it makes the best sweetening for applesauce.) In the Vaud, raisinée is sometimes made, as it always was, in a giant cauldron by friends working together. They stir continuously, to prevent burning on the bottom, during the 24 hours and more the syrup takes to thicken. It can keep indefinitely, even for years.
Raisinée, when sugar was a luxury, was the sweetening of the poor, like vin cuit in France or sapa in Italy, which are boiled down from sweet grape must. Raisinée comes from raisin, the French word for “grape,” and the name of the apple and pear version was borrowed from the grape one. Rarely, in Switzerland the syrup does contain grapes. And even when it contains none, in part of the Vaud and neighboring Fribourg it’s called vin cuit. (The syrup has also had other names, and raisinée is sometimes masculine: le raisiné.) Tarte à la raisinée is the one thing still commonly made with it.
Recipes vary in their proportions and ingredients. Cream is usual; eggs aren’t mandatory (but without them the filling may be gluey and slowly flow); sugar is added when the raisinée seems too acidic (as it often does to modern tastes), and frequently there is starch thickening. But the starch is wholly unnecessary and makes the texture less delicate, and if you use it you have to boil the filling before you pour it into the pastry shell. The recipe most often used as a reference is that of the chef Frédy Girardet, who is from the Vaud and whose restaurant there, before he retired in 1996, was widely considered top in the world. He used no starch but enriched the mixture with an extra egg yolk.
It’s not hard to make raisinée yourself, if you live in a place where you can buy freshly pressed sweet apple juice (US “sweet cider”). It takes two to three hours to boil down a gallon (almost four liters), but there’s no work — you don’t even have to stir. The time and resulting quantity depend on how sweet the juice is to begin with. When I once measured, the ratio of juice to syrup was around 8 to 1. For clearer syrup, during the first part of boiling several times skim the foam that rises from cloudy juice. Toward the end, the syrup thickens fast — don’t let it burn! It’s done when you place a drop on a plate, draw a spoon through it, and the mark remains.
dough for a single 9- to 10-inch (24-cm) flaky crust
125 ml (½ cup) raisinée (see text above)
up to 80 gr (3/8 cup) sugar or none at all, according to the acidity of the raisinée
3 large eggs
125 ml (½ cup) heavy cream
Roll out the dough and line a 9- to 10-inch (24-cm) tart mold with a removable bottom. Bake the pastry “blind” (covering the dough with aluminum foil or baking parchment and weighting it, such as with dried beans) for 12 minutes at 425° F (220° C), then uncover and continue until it is touched with golden brown, about 5 more minutes. Reduce the oven setting to 375° F (190° C).
Stir together the four ingredients of the filling with a spoon, without creating foam (which would show on the surface of the finished tart). Pour the liquid into the hot, fully baked pastry shell and place it in the oven without spilling. (If your oven rack slides easily and remains level, it’s easier to fill the shell while it sits on the partly pulled-out rack.) Bake until the filling is just set — no longer liquid but showing some movement when jostled. Cool 10 minutes, and unmold onto rack. Serves 8.
