Devising a "Liverpool Tart" to rival the "Manchester Tart" in the cake-shops, bakeries, supermarkets, tea-rooms and family kitchens of Merseyside and beyond, to be available from 2008?                 
contact me      the recipe, now   the 1897recipe   Liver Bird cutters    Liverpool Judies?   how it came about & earlier attempts.   where to buy the tarts  

Individual size. Two 4-Yorkshire Pud tins, lined with good pastry, "dark muscovado-plus-lemon" mix, sprinkled with icing sugar.

the original recipe says "cross bar over" and most people think this is what is meant.

various decor ideas tried out, using Liver Bird cutters from "KIT BOX" in Bristol.

The TASTE is "Muscovado sugar and Lemon!" HERE IS THE RECIPE. I have had a few attempts, and I think the recipe should now read more like this, if written today, for today's cooks, with today's machinery. Liverpool Judy Tart, 2007 PASTRY; (as normal today) 8 oz flour.   4oz fat/marge/butter.   1 tsp icing sugar.    Pinch of salt.    4 tbsp cold water. Make the pastry, and after leaving it in the fridge, (so it won't shrink later) grease wo four-yorkshire-pudding baking trays, to make eight individual tarts, or two twelve-fairycake trays, for 14 Small Tarts. Cut the pastry with 110mm for Yorks or 85mm cutter for small tarts. This mix will provide enough pastry and filling for both versions. NB; although this mix will provide enough pastry for two family-size shallow tart dishes, all the filling will only be enough for one of them; two mixes of filling would be needed here. FILLING; 8 oz. Dark Muscovado sugar    2oz butter or marge,    1 egg,    and one whole unwaxed lemon. Melt the butter & sugar, then let it cool but not solidify. Cut lemon in pieces small enough to remove pips. Use a blender to mash it fairly fine. (10 seconds) Put everything into a mixer, with an egg, and beat until fairly smooth, (a bit of "texture" does no harm), and LADLE the mixture into the pastry trays; ladle 3 tbsp each. (yorks) or one tbsp for Small tarts. Do not use more than this or the filling will overflow during baking. . Bake at Gas 5, until just before the pastry starts to brown, or the filling to crisp. This should mean about 22 MINUTES on Gas 5 in the middle shelf. (The second tray, on a lower oven shelf, will need another ten minutes on the top shelf.) NB; on removal from the oven there will be an (attractive) "butter-bloom" on the surface, but this will fade overnight to a uniform dark brown. TOPPING; definitely something white. Dust with icing sugar? Blobs of whipped Cream? Liver Bird shape on top? Liver Bird cutters may be bought as one-off special orders from KITBOX in Bristol. The original said "Cross bar over" i.e. twist strips of pastry across the top in both directions, and this would be an ideal simple version for home baking. Cover with fondant icing is not a good idea; the tart is sweet ebough, and the extra sweetness of the icing can spoil the special taste of muscovado and lemon. Back to theTop of the page. Liverpool Tart, 1897 8 oz. moist (?)sugar.         2oz butter.       1 egg.       1 lemon.       pastry Put the butter and sugar into a moderate oven to melt. When melted, let it cool. Boil your lemon whole very slowly (or it will break) until quite soft. Mince it whole as it is, saving the juice as much as possible and taking out the pips. Mince very fine. Beat the egg well. Mix all well together. Line a flat open tart dish with good paste [ie pastry] and pour in the mixture to one uniform thickness (about ½ an inch). Cross bar over and bake. Serve hot or cold. "Cross bar over" probably means laying twisted strips of pastry across the surface, in both directions, like your Gran used to. I did try "Liverpool tart" in Google, but this only produced many thousands of references to a certain type of young lady.      In stark contrast, searching for "Liverpool tart recipe " produced only this one single hit, out of the millions of pages. Do you fancy trying to make this, based on a recipe from 1897, with the addition of a Liver Bird cut from rolled fondant icing. Do let me know how you get on, what problems you found. Do remember that the AIM is not just to produce a nice recipe, but something which can become a "standard" and a "local delicacy", as popular locally as Bakewell Tarts or Chelsea Buns or Eccles Cakes. Something which can be made at home, and which will SELL in cake shops and tea-rooms. Back to theTop of the page. LIVER BIRD CUTTERS? If you are making these tarts at home, for the family, as I hope most people will, then It is possible to make a recognisable Liver Bird by using a couple of pairs of pliers to re-shape an "egg-ring." Alternatively, a Liver Bird can be drawn free-hand with food-colour Pens on rice paper - or indeed you could do something with the "potato-cut" printing we did at school onto rice paper or icing. If you are in business and want to make professional looking Liver Bird shapes, then these will be made to order by Dyck Willis of Bristol, Dyck Willis of Bristol, trading as"KIT BOX," The birds will need to be prised out using a cocktail stick, and it helps if you dip the cutter into icing sugar or cornflour first. Back to theTop of the page. Click to go BACK to my Home Page. Click here to email me.

MISSION STATEMENT. My aim in publicising the "Liverpool Tart" is to make it a standard item of confectionery alongside the Bakewell Tart and the Eccles Cake, available in just as many outlets, bakeries, cake-shops, and homes, locally at first then nationally, starting in Liverpool in 2008. This recipe has been on the Evershot Village page for a while, and on this page of mine since February 2007. This means it is firmly in the "public domain", and is "open source" as compuer buffs would term it, belonging to nobody, impossible to copyright the basic recipe, but leaving everyone free to develop their own version of it. PROGRESS AND COMMENTARY; 22nd April 2007 Two professional companies have now tried the tarts I have made, and while they enjoyed them, they each felt that they are not yet a product that would Sell. More "eye-appeal" is needed, and maybe this involves a greated height/depth, and they are not too keen on the dark appearance. However, I am now convinced that the "muscovado-lemon" taste is very distinctive and memorable, maybe even unique, and has to be at the heart of the Liverpool Tart. To this end I have bought some Liver Bird pastry-cutters, and made the birds with sugarpaste or flowerpaste.. Rice paper has been tried but does not seem promising. I did try covering most of the dark filling with icing, and adding colour to the Liver Bird. But this extra sugar weakened the lemon tang, but has made the overall taste closer to "mince pies" and so it lost the very distinctive taste of the dark tarts. PASTRY; the original recipe just says "Line with good paste". I am using what I believe to be a very standard pastry, but using Self-Raising Flour, and a spoon of icing sugar too. This can be rolled very thin, as it does thicken well, and goes well with the filling. On the other hand, a thick pastry crumbles in the with filling in the mouth in a pleasant way. Some tasters tell me that they always use Plain Flour for pastry. SUGAR; Dark Muscovado Sugar has proved to be a good translation of "moist" sugar. This made a lovely brown background, crying out for "something white" to go on top. Tasted lovely, with the lemon coming through most unexpectedly. This sugar, however, tends to impart a rather "treacle tart" taste and appearance to the mix, which may be either ideal or just distracting. Some element of icing certainly tones down the lemon tang, but in the view of some testers, it changes the overall taste to that of "mince pies" , so that won't do. Light Brown Sugar was tried, and it proved to be half-way in colour between white and muscovado, still rather red than brown, but closer than white sugar to the "renowned local delicacy" we are aiming for, and I do not plan to try it again. Perhaps somebody else will? I am inclined to discount Demerara sugar, because - although the colour may be similar - I fear it may produce a slightly gritty feel on the tongue. On the other hand, Liverpool is a "gritty real-life" city, and "Togo" is an old Liverpool name for raw sugar. I did start with white granulated sugar but this did not "melt." The tarts had the "lemon surprise" taste, but looked like very ordinary "marmalade" tarts. No further action planned. CARAMELISING? one suggestion is that a Cook's Blow-torch be used to caramelise the sugary surface. Must try it, even though it is unlikely to be taken up in any mass-production process. LEMON; I am convinced this is essential, with its flavour coming as a surprise through the "toffee" of the dark sugar. In the first batches, I used a good big lemon each time, which gave a flavour too strong for some tastes, and also will have cost implications. SO I am now trying rather smaller lemons, as sold in packs of four, and settling on "unwaxed" lemons as I have been told this can help to avoid bitterness. Alternatives such as artificial lemon juice would not provide the "bulk", leaving just sugar and butter, while the semi-crunchy attractive texture on the tongue would be missing. TOPPING; the dark muscovado filling clearly calls out for something white; icing or cream. A light dusting with icing sugar is cheap and very attractive. Rosettes of whipped cream would look marvellous, while anything with cream might help control the sweetness. NOT meringue; I tried little meringue swirls, which looked lovely, but the meringue and the lemon cancelled each other out, leaving a taste of "nothing." SHAPES AND IMAGES> For Batch 5 (Feb 07) I tried making a cutter (from an "egg-ring") of a Liver Bird , and the results were immediately recognised by test groups, and looked spectacular. On the other hand, another local bakery chain felt the dark appearance would not "Sell", and are trying covering the filling completely with fondant icing, as a Bakewell tart, but then having a Liver Bird on top, made of coloured sugarpaste. This looked good - see Batch 9 - but all that fondant icing ruined the muscovado-lemon taste, so I am looking into ways of using much less icing. This may include clever ways of using mirror-image birds, and/or by using stencils through which icing sugar may be spread, to leave white images of the Liver Bird above the Mersey Waves. SIZES; three possible sizes spring to mind. Family ; an eight-inch tart, for cutting into six or eight wedges. Individual; a four-inch single tart, for serving in restaurants and tea-shops. Multipack ;a three-inch small tart, as sold in packs of three of more. Except that there have been comments that these would be too small for just one to be satifsfying. I did try a few in most batches, to use up excess pastry and filler. Also these would call for a very small Liver Bird Cutter, from which it might be too fiddly to remove the Bird. FAMILY SIZE? I tried this (4 Feb 07) (Batch Six) with some interesting results, which make me less inclined to follow this route much further myself. 1. The pastry mix will line two 9-inch tart-tins, but the filling mix will only fill ONE of them! 2. My home-made Liver Bird cutter I have made produces birds which mean only six wedges per tart, but the smaller one I have had made by KIT BOX will overcome this problem. 3. The baking took over twice as long, and the filling stayed runny for a long time. Further Family Tarts would need two mixes of filling, smaller Bird cutter to allow 8-10-12 slices, and further experiments to find proper baking time and heat. NB; must try it served with CREAM! ============================================================== Back to theTop of the page. BACK to my Home Page. 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WHERE CAN I BUY THEM? May 2007; at DAFNA'S Cheescake Factory, 240 Smithdown Rd. Liverpool L15 5AH Tel (44)0151 733 7808 yacovlev@hotmail.com Small size 35p YorksPud size 70p. And they are now being trialled in North Merseyside, by SATTERTHWAITES of Crosby 51 Coronation Road, Crosby, L23 5RE Telephone: +(44) (0) 15 12 86 96 90 Small size 35p ... and one major supermarket will start selling them in March 2008.

On the right... Some other possible decor versions, using the Liver Birds, and a tube of "write it yourself" ready-made icing, with a "Mersey Waves" theme. KITBOX will soon be supplying some "waves" cutters, in "smooth" and "choppy" versions. This is all in keeping with the general idea that the basic tart is now fixed, but that anyone can make their own version of the decor and finish.

small and "yorkshire" as sold by Dafna's, with biscuit crumb powder round a Liver Bird shape.

Satterthwaites small tart, with Heart motif, for "Liverpool; the city with a heart"

heart cutters by FMM products, set of 3 for £4.99 from Centre Attraction.

LIVERPOOL JUDIES? Should we call this delicacy a "Liverpool Judy?" There is a generation gap growing here; most people above a certain age will know that the term "Judy" was used for many generations as a term for "girl-friend", and was used in a pleasant and friendly way, with a smile. Many people Under a certain age will need to have that explained to them. There is indeed a Liverpool sea-shanty, whose chorus is "...and it's Row, Row bullies, row; those Liverpool Judies have got us in tow". a fanciful image of the girls they left at home in Liverpool all pulling on a theoretical tow-rope to bring their sailor-boy lovers safely home soon. "Liverpool Judies" in Google gives over 400 mentions of this term, mainly from this one sea-shanty As far as I know, use of the term "Judy" for girl-friend is pure Liverpool, and not used anywhere else in the world. . I would also personally prefer"Liverpool Judy" as this is a Non-Specific Name, one which does not specify any particular kind of confection. I think this makes it feel more traditional and local, and therefore more attractive to visitors. One friend suggested "Judy-cakes" but I think this means it would have to be a cake, and could not be a tart. Chorley, Eccles and Dundee have their Cakes. Manchester, Bakewell and others have their Tarts or their Biscuits. I would prefer Liverpool to go that bit further to be distinctive and quirky. Back to theTop of the page.

NON-SPECIFIC NAME. Why don't we settle for "WET NELLIES"? Because these relied on using unsold and "beyond-date" left-over cake materials for the filling, and Health & Safety would make it very difficult for anyone to get away with that these days, more's the pity. Also, while they are extremely well-known in Liverpool, they do not "project the Liverpool brand" because of not having the "Liverpool " name. Back to theTop of the page.

This started in January 2007 when I tried a Manchester Tart in the coffee-shop of John Lewis store, Liverpool (George Henry Lees), and thought that there really should be a "Liverpool Tart" to rival or replace it, especially with Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture.

Google came up with just one page, the "original" recipe, from a hand-written family cookbook dating back to 1897, owned by a resident of a village called Evershot, in Dorset. This has proved to be an excellent basis, with a distinctive and possibly unique taste. It is also be handy having this "provenance" - being able to prove that OUR tart goes back over 100 years.
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	Here are some pages linked to this page: Mersey And Deeside folk dance clubs Lyrics of some Liverpool Songs. Gerry Jones, the handy musician Liverpool branch of the RSCDS IRISH Dancing information. Back to the Home page Back to theTop of the page.