The open leek tart of Picardy, its filling sweated slowly in butter and bound with cream and egg
Origin: Picardy & the Somme, France
From the journey of Leek.
The name comes from the Flemish and means something like a flat cake, which places the dish exactly where it belongs: in the belt of cool northern country that runs from the Somme across the Belgian border, where the leek grows better than anywhere else in Europe. Flamiche in its oldest form was a bread dough round baked with butter and eaten hot, and Dinant in Belgium still makes a cheese version of it. What Picardy did was fill it with leeks, and the leek version has become the one everybody means. The filling is nothing but leeks, a great deal of butter, cream, and egg, and the whole thing depends on how the leeks are treated before they ever see the pastry. They must be sweated, not fried, and sweated for a long time. Twenty-five or thirty minutes over a low heat with butter and a pinch of salt, covered for part of it, until the leeks have collapsed to a fraction of their volume and turned silky and sweet without taking any colour at all. Browned leek is bitter and there is nothing else in a flamiche to balance it. Hurried leek is watery, and water is the enemy of a custard tart: it will not set, and the base goes soft. The cream and egg are there to bind rather than to dominate, which distinguishes a flamiche from a quiche. The ratio is deliberately low, the filling should be mostly vegetable, and a properly made one cuts into wedges that hold their shape whilst still tasting overwhelmingly of leek. It is eaten warm rather than hot, as a light lunch with a green salad, and it is at its best in the depth of winter.
One point two kilograms of leeks reduces to roughly enough to fill a 24 cm tart. It always looks like too much in the pan and never is. Use only the white and pale green. The coarse dark tops are fibrous and will not soften in the time available; keep them for stock. The cheese is optional and mildly contentious. Purists in the Somme leave it out; most modern recipes include it. It reheats well at 160°C for fifteen minutes and is good cold, though the pastry softens overnight. The Belgian flamiche dinantaise is the same idea filled with Boulette de Romedenne cheese instead of leeks, and is the older form of the dish.
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