Around My French Table - Gérard's Mustard Tart

I love food and I love cookbooks with pictures.  A photo of beautiful food will inspire me to shop and labor in the kitchen, all the while drooling in anticipation of the final result.  I'm also pretty intuitive in the kitchen - I can look at a recipe and just know that it will be good based on the ingredients.  Ron thinks this makes me dangerous because I'm willing to try new recipes on unsuspecting guests.  I have been fooled a few times, and only from the standpoint that the final result was less than stellar.  Except for the Sorrel soup incident.  

So, I was looking through my Around My French Table cookbook and came upon a photograph of a beautiful tart.  The crust was beautiful and the tart was cooked to perfection with an alluring display of julienned carrots and something green in a spoke pattern on top.  It made my mouth water just looking at it.

Then I read the recipe.  Gérard's Mustard Tart.  Hmmmm.  I like mustard, and I'm learning to like more types of mustard.  Years ago, while perusing the offerings at Harrod's in London, I found a lovely jar of Bavarian Sweet Mustard.  I bought it more for the pretty jar than the mustard, but it turned out the mustard was quite good! 

Bavarian Sweet Mustard in a lovely blue and white jar

Mustard is not a key ingredient in American cooking, and when we use mustard, it is usually prepared mustard, so the Bavarian sweet variety was a very pleasant surprise and the beginning of my appreciation for mustard.

I don't know what prompted me to buy my first jar of Dijon, but I'm pretty sure it had a lot to do with a man with a British accent in the back of a Rolls Royce looking for some Grey Poupon.  I found Dijon mustard a bit strong, but very tasty and I tend to use it sparingly.

Dijon Mustard - this brand is my favorite!

Having said that though, I use Dijon mustard almost daily as it is a key ingredient to my homemade vinaigrette. 

And somewhere along the line I discovered country style or à l'ancienne - a whole grain mustard that isn't nearly as eye-watering-palate-burning-nasal-passage-inflaming as Dijon mustard.

 

moutarde à l'ancienne

So yeah - I like mustard as a condiment, but as the main ingredient?  I had doubts.  My recipe intuition was working subtlety at over-coming those doubts.  I moved on to other recipes and had half-formulated a dinner plan but the photo of Gérard's Mustard Tart kept calling me back.  The photo is mouth-wateringly beautiful and...well...what's the worst that could happen?  I make a mustard tart, we hate it and have to go get crêpes instead.  I decided it was worth the gamble and embarked on a mustard tart adventure.

I went shopping for my ingredients - and got to experience another first.  Those pretty green things spoked on top of the tart with the carrots were leeks.  I have never bought leeks before, so this will be another first!  Exciting! 

I had to buy a ready-made crust as I don't have the tools to make my own.  I saw lots of French people buying these crusts, so they must be good.  Hundreds of thousands of French cooks can't be wrong.  I made Gérard's tart exactly as the recipe was written except for the crust.   The recipe calls for Dijon and à l'ancienne mustards, so I used both.  I assembled the tart and put it in the oven to bake.  It smelled wonderful as it was baking, but occasionally I'd get a whiff of eye-watering, palate-burning, nasal-passage-inflaming Dijon and I was grateful the crêpe vendor was right across the street. 

I baked the tart with conventional oven instructions in a convection oven - what can I say? - my oven at home does the conversion for me - so my tart was a little over-cooked on the top:

my singed mustard tart

We were armed with a salad and a baguette and change in our pockets to dash over to the crêperie when we took our first bite.

It was WONDERUL!  

We ate the WHOLE thing!

Ron's seal of approval?  "You could definitely make this again."

I did make it again, but this time I used tomatoes and a better tart pan:

Tomatoes are in season! Yes!

I found a handy-dandy conventional-to-convection oven converter on-line and baked the tart at the right temperature for the right amount of time:

Beautiful, isn't it?!  No singeing!

And with the removable-bottomed tart pan I was able to  put my beautiful creation on a serving dish:

The crust is a little wonky - need to work on that

And then we noshed:

délicieux!

Once again, we had a salad and a baguette to round out our meal.  Parfait! 

Fabulous lunch or light dinner!

I am so glad I gave this tart a try!  Once baked, the mustard blends wonderfully with the eggs and adds a remarkable tang to an otherwise traditional tart.  Since the backbone of this recipe is a basic tart, you can refresh the recipe as often as the seasonal vegetables change.