Somewhere in Kent, some time ago…
Delata moved around the countryside as the seasons changed. She was carried by the breeze through the fruit trees, picking cherries in the sun, onto apples or hops in the autumn, her face bathed in gold.
It was sometime in autumn 1929 when she was walking back home to her caravan across the fields in the Isle of Sheppey in Kent when she passed by some children that looked so thin and undernourished. They were caught up in their games, happy despite their visible hunger. Delata was a kind-hearted soul and wanted to do something for them, it troubled her that they were so desperately hungry. So she returned to her caravan to see what meagre offerings she had that she could share with them.
She didn’t have much. All that she could find was a tin of evaporated milk, some brown sugar and some flour and lard to the make pastry. With these simple ingredients, she created a tart with a crisp base and sweet creamy filling that she took to the children to satisfy their hunger, if only for a short while.
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Well, it might have gone something like that. Legend has it that Gypsy Tart was created by a Gypsy woman in the Isle of Sheppey to feed some hungry children. Legend also has it that perhaps the children were gypsies and that the recipe could be over 100 years old. Although there’s no specific date, evaporated milk became more widely available to buy in the 1920s and ’30s, so that might help date the recipe. Like many origin stories, the details are vague and slightly mysterious, which adds to their allure.
The recipe went on to become a school dinner staple, a regular on bakery shelves and is now reincarnated into the simply divine Herbert’s Gypsy Tart Ice Cream. Which I recommend you hunt down, by the way, if you happen to be in Folkestone. There’s a kiosk in the harbour and it’s the only place I’ve seen where you can buy it.
What is Gypsy Tart?
A tart of evaporated milk, sugar and pastry might sound a bit plain. But there’s some magic that happens when you mix up the sugar and the milk. It transforms into a frothy, creamy, sweet, butterscotch and burnt caramel liquid velvet. It is so excruciatingly sweet that your dentine will heave under the strain.
To make this magic, the recipes call for really cold evaporated milk (in the fridge overnight) and brown or muscovado sugar which you mix for 15 minutes. The pastry case is cooked first, blind baked to a pale crisp shell. Then the mixture is poured in before returning to the oven on low heat until it’s cooked just enough to hold its shape. It should shudder slightly across the surface as you take it out of the oven. It then needs to be left alone until completely cool otherwise it will protest to being sliced and you could end up with a molten puddle on your plate.
