Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Apples with Red Currant Jelly
Apples with Red Currant Jelly
6 cooking apples, 4 tablespoons flour, 1 egg, cake crumbs, apricot jam, 6 glace cherries, red currant jelly, Crisco and syrup. Choose apples as much as possible same size, peel and core them carefully, so as not to break them. Put 1 cup syrup into stewpan or baking tin, put in apples and cook over fire or in oven until nearly done. Baste them occasionally with syrup. Let them get cold, then roll them in flour, brush over with beaten egg, toss in sifted cake crumbs, and fry in hot Crisco a golden brown. Drain on piece of paper, fill centers with apricot jam, cut out some rounds of red currant jelly, place 1 on top of each apple and a glace cherry on that. Dish up and serve hot or cold. An apricot syrup should be sent to table separately with apples.
A fried stuffed apple dressed as a dessert, from a Crisco promotional cookbook. The whole thing hinges on the apples being poached firm and then thoroughly cold before they go into the fat.
- The syrup"1 cup syrup" means a plain sugar syrup, not corn syrup or maple; a syrup of roughly equal parts sugar and water is one common period proportion. The recipe does not say how the separate apricot syrup is made; the obvious reading is the same syrup flavoured with sieved apricot jam and thinned to pouring consistency.
- Choose a firm appleAnything that collapses when cooked will fall apart in the fryer. Use a variety that holds its shape, and take the apples off the heat while they still resist a skewer slightly. "Nearly done" is the operative phrase.
- Cold is not optionalWarm poached apples weep, the coating slides off, and the apple bursts in the fat. Chill them thoroughly, ideally several hours in the refrigerator, and pat them dry before flouring.
- Cake crumbsDry sponge or plain cake crumbs, sieved fine, standing in for breadcrumbs. Stale sponge cake or trimmed-off pound cake, dried in a low oven and rolled, gives the same result. They brown faster than bread, so watch the colour.
- Crisco and frying temperatureCrisco was new in 1911 and this book was published to promote it; any neutral frying fat or oil works. The recipe says only "hot Crisco"; the usual modern deep-frying range of about 350-375F suits it, since too high a heat will scorch the sweet cake crumbs before the apple is warmed through.
- Rounds of jellySet red currant jelly in a shallow pan to about a quarter-inch, then stamp out rounds with a small cutter dipped in hot water. Cut them just before serving; on a hot apple they will slump within minutes.
- Yield and servingSix apples, one per person. Fill the cores with warmed apricot jam so it spoons in cleanly, and pass the apricot syrup in a jug.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble as an advertisement in book form: Crisco had been introduced in 1911, and the recipes exist in large part to demonstrate that the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could do everything lard and butter did, including deep-frying. That explains the shape of this dish, which is essentially a coated fritter built around a whole poached apple, a treatment English and American cookery applied to everything from croquettes to fried cream. The decoration is pure late-Victorian confectioner's practice: apricot jam in the cavity, a stamped round of clear red currant jelly for colour, a glacé cherry on top. Red currant jelly was a staple preserve in that period, kept as much for garnishing and glazing as for spreading, and its firm set is what allows it to be cut into rounds at all.