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"Thorn" Apples
Prepare a syrup by boiling two cups sugar and one and threefourths cups water ten minutes. Wash, wipe, core and pare the desired number of apples (about eight for this quantity of syrup). Drop apples into syrup when pared, to prevent discoloration. Cook until tender, skimming syrup when necessary. Use a deep sauce-pan for this purpose, as apples cook better when covered with syrup. Better cook four apples at a time. Drain from syrup and fill the cavities with quince jelly and stick apples thickly with blanched and shredded almonds slightly toasted. Cut the almonds lengthwise in three pieces, then divide, making six "thorns." It is best to toast them in the oven until they are a golden brown..
A poached-apple dessert that lives or dies by the apple: it must hold its shape whole in syrup. Everything else is assembly.
- Choose a firm appleUse a variety that keeps its shape when cooked — Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Cortland or a firm baking apple. A McIntosh or similar soft apple will collapse in the syrup and cannot be studded.
- The syrupTwo cups sugar to one and three-quarter cups water is close to equal weights of sugar and water, a medium-strength poaching syrup. Boiling it the specified ten minutes dissolves the sugar and concentrates it a little.
- Cook in batches, and lowThe instruction to do four apples at a time is the important one. A crowded pan means uneven cooking and knocked-about fruit. Keep the syrup at a bare simmer, not a boil, and turn the apples once or twice — 15 to 30 minutes depending on size and variety. They are done when a skewer slides in with no resistance at the shoulder.
- Blanching almondsWhole raw almonds, not slivered: cover with boiling water for a minute, drain, and slip the skins off between finger and thumb. Slivered almonds from a packet are too short and too soft to read as thorns.
- ToastingThe recipe gives no temperature: a moderate oven (around 350F) for a few minutes, shaken once, until golden. Watch closely, as blanched almonds go from pale to burnt quickly.
- Quince jellyStill sold, often in Middle Eastern, Spanish or Portuguese groceries. Red currant jelly is the nearest substitute for colour and tartness; quince paste (membrillo) softened with a spoonful of the poaching syrup also works.
- Don't waste the syrupThe recipe says only to drain the apples. Boil the leftover syrup down until it coats a spoon and pour it around them — it will have taken on flavour from the fruit.
- Yield and servingAbout eight apples, one per person. Assemble the almonds no more than an hour or two ahead; they soften once they sit against damp fruit.
Stuck fruit of this kind was a familiar flourish in turn-of-the-century American cookery, where a poached apple or pear might appear as "hedgehog," "porcupine" or, as here, "thorn" apples. It sits in the same tradition as the older English hedgehog puddings and tipsy cakes bristling with almond spikes, and belongs to a period when a dessert was expected to look like something. Elizabeth O. Hiller's 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) laid out a year of menus for the household cook, and a dish like this sits at the modest end of the showpiece scale: no moulds, no ice, no special equipment, just fruit, sugar and a careful hand. Quince jelly, valued for its high pectin and sharp perfume, was still a common preserve in American kitchens at the time.