Milk tart (Melktert) is an Afrikaans style of refrigerated vanilla custard tart, typically topped with cinnamon.

Custard tart is so extremely common it seems kind of crazy to attribute a recipe to any one place but we do give it to the Portugese so I guess it’s fine. Wikipedia says it is influenced by the Portugese egg tarts, which, makes sense, but is totally uncited. Fortunately for me in 2020 Rachel C. Botes at the University of Pretoria did a masters thesis on the history of milk tart, so we can reference that instead. I’ll be real I did not read all 200 pages of this but Chapter 5 is the most relevant.

This is an adaptation of the milk tart recipe my mother uses, which is out of a microwave cooking book. Quite a few recipes we use are out ofthis, including a fudge I have yet to make myself, but in this case I think that it is actually way more of a pain in the ass to try and move a big bowl of boiling milk in and out of a microwave than it is to do this on the stove. If you’d like to try that, here’s the original recipe:

The weights above are reasonable and worked for me but should not be considered a fully tested recipe, but also, cornstarch-thickened egg custard is perhaps an impossibly forgiving kind of custard to work with, the chances of it failing to set are practically zero.

Doing it on the stove does of course bring in the risk of scrambling the eggs, scorching the milk, and generally screwing it up, but if you don’t make any bonehead moves and stay at the pan the whole time you only really need to keep it boiling for a minute or two max. Use the microwave method if you want.

You can make a real pastry base if you are being fancy about it. I have never done this. In South Africa, Marie Biscuits are a pretty common base, they’re a butter and egg flour biscuit. I don’t get those easily here in the Czech Republic so I use Marks and Spencer Rich Tea biscuits. Biscoff would probably be a pretty different taste, but it would probably be good, I’ll try it sometime. Grind the biscuits in a food processor or blender if you don’t want to be here all day, and do it in batches so you don’t end up with an abundance of fines while chasing the last bouldery pieces. You could sift this through a coarse sieve to standardize it. If I ever get a set of geological sand sieves I’ll figure out what the right particle size is.

The texture of the base pre-filling can be a quite short, since it’ll steal some moisture from the tart and get sturdier as it sits in the fridge, but you definitely don’t want it to be crumbling. You don’t necessarily use all the biscuits, but 125g should more than cover a 28cm pie tin. The base should be fairly thin, maybe 4-7mm, this isn’t a particularly thick tart in most constructions.

I would usually use a tart pan with a removable bottom, if you do this in a ceramic or otherwise solid pan you can mix the biscuit base right in the pan. Up to you whether you take the biscuit base up the sides or only cover the bottom of the pan, the custard is more than sturdy enough to hold up on its own.

The cinnamon layer is variable, some people use very little, others use a basically solid layer of cinnamon. Good opportunity to make paper templates with little decorative designs in them as well. I did not have a sufficiently fine strainer to do a good job of even dusting for this one but we can call it rustic.