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Sweet

Melktert

A thin pastry case with a very soft milk custard and a thick layer of cinnamon sugar on top. Less sweet than anything else here — and the most popular.

Melktert comes from seventeenth-century Cape Dutch cooking and is related to the Dutch mattentaart. What separates it from a custard tart is the ratio: a great deal of milk, very little egg — which is why the filling is soft rather than firm.

Prep
40 min
On the fire
25 min
Serves
8
Effort
medium
A freshly baked melktert with a thick layer of cinnamon sugar, on a cooling rack
DimiTalen · CC BY-SA 3.0

When it goes on

Right at the end

Pudding in the last of the heat — or something that needs no fire at all.

Equipment: Oven

This line

Trekboers and Voortrekkers1652 to about 1900

The three-legged pot, sausage as a way of keeping meat, bread without an oven.

Method

  1. Make the pastry

    Mix flour, icing sugar and salt, rub in the cold butter with your fingertips to coarse crumbs. Add the egg and bring it together quickly. Do not knead — shortcrust toughens with work.

  2. Chill and blind-bake

    Chill for half an hour, roll out into a 24 cm tin, prick with a fork and blind-bake at 180 °C for about 20 minutes, until dry and lightly coloured.

  3. Scald the milk

    Heat 500 ml of the milk with the butter and cinnamon stick until it bubbles at the edge. Do not boil it.

  4. Mix the base

    Whisk the remaining milk smooth with sugar, flour, cornflour, egg yolks, vanilla and salt. Take out the cinnamon stick and pour the cold mixture into the hot milk, stirring.

  5. Thicken

    Over low heat, stirring constantly, until the custard thickens noticeably — about five minutes. Take it off the heat.

  6. Fold in the whites

    Whisk the egg whites stiff and fold them into the still-warm custard in two goes. This is the step that separates melktert from a custard tart: it makes it airy rather than sliceable.

  7. Fill and chill

    Pour into the baked case, level it, cool completely and then refrigerate for at least four hours. Dust thickly with cinnamon sugar only just before serving.

Tips

  • The cinnamon sugar goes on last. Sprinkled too early it dissolves into the moist surface and leaves brown patches instead of a layer.
  • Melktert should wobble. If it cuts like cheesecake, there is too much starch in it or it spent too long on the heat.
  • There is a fridge version with no pastry at all, using biscuits as the base. It is common, faster and considerably worse.

Melktert is the pudding that shows South African cooking is not only meat and fire. It is barely sweet, it is pale, it looks unremarkable — and it is in every bakery between Cape Town and Pretoria.

What separates it from every related tart is the ratio of milk to egg. A custard tart is firm because egg sets it; melktert is soft because milk dominates and flour and cornflour do the work. The whisked egg whites make it airier still.

And the cinnamon is not arbitrary. It appears twice — as a stick in the milk, where it stays discreet, and as a thick layer of cinnamon sugar on top, where it is the actual flavour.

Where it comes from

Where the word comes from
Afrikaans · Literally „milk tart“ Related to the Dutch *mattentaart*, but with far more milk and far less egg.

Melktert comes out of the seventeenth-century Cape Dutch kitchen and is related to the Dutch mattentaart. What it became at the Cape differs in one ratio: a lot of milk, not much egg. A European custard tart is firm and cuts cleanly; a melktert is soft and wobbles when you move the tin.

Behind that is not refinement but availability. Milk was plentiful, eggs cost more. Out of that arithmetic came a filling set with flour or cornflour rather than egg alone — which is also why it can be finished on the stove without an oven.

The cinnamon on top is not decoration. It reached the Cape through the same spice trade that shaped Cape Malay cooking, and it is the one point where a melktert tastes of the south rather than the north.

It belongs at a braai because it is eaten cold and is ready before the fire is lit. Late in the afternoon, when nobody wants more meat, it goes on the table — and it is usually the first thing finished.

Sources for this section

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Total time
40 min
Serves
6
Heat of the coals
medium
Equipment
Hinged grid