Onion tart with some sort of pastry

Here is another recipe from my current favourite (non-electronic) cookbook, Small Adventures in Cooking.  Plus, this recipe for onion and anchovy tart is even easier to make if you use store-bought pastry, like I did. More on the pastry later...

All you need to do is slice up some onions (no fiddly dicing required - slicing is so much easier, don't you think?); a few small tears were shed, I must admit. Then cook down the onions till they are soft. Roll out the pastry and blind bake, fill the tart and you're on your way to enjoying a sensationally scrumptious meal.

Onion and Anchovy Tart

serves 8

Ingredients

300g shortcrust pastry

50g butter

6 onions, peeled and finely sliced

salt and pepper

2 eggs

100ml cream

100g grated Gruyere or Cheddar cheese

approx 12 anchovy fillets in oil, drained

Method

1. For the pastry: Preheat oven to 180C. Line a 25cm tart tin with the pastry. Prick all over with a fork, then line with a piece of baking paper and fill with cooking weights or uncooked rice or beans to weigh it down. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes, then remove the paper and weights and return to the oven for 5 minutes.

2. For the onions: In a large frypan, melt the butter over low heat and add the onions. Season with salt and pepper, cover and cook for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.

3. Allow the onions to cool a bit. Beat together the cream and eggs and stir into the onions together with the cheese. Season with salt and pepper and pour into the baked tart shell.  Lay the anchovies over the top. Cook the tart in the oven for 30-40 minutes, until the filling is set.  Cool for 10 minutes before serving.

recipe from Small Adventures in Cooking by James Ramsden

Ingredients: Lots of onions, lots of butter, eggs, anchovies and cheese.

And cream. And pastry, but more on that later...

I'm not the only one who's crying - Tabitha cat is affected by the onion fumes, too!

Slow cooking of the onions makes them soft and luscious.

The pastry (more on that later...) is blind-baked before being filled with the onions.

The anchovies provide a sharp saltiness to the tart. 

Deliciously rich. Serve warm or cold.

And what about this pastry? The packet says shortcrust, but surely that's puff pastry in there!

The puff pastry didn't affect the flavour of the tart, but shortcrust might have been preferable.

Another recipe from Small Adventures in Cooking is here.