Apple Lemon
Pare and quarter eight apples, then put one-half pound coffee sugar into your preserving kettle with one quart water; when it boils, drop the apples in and let them remain until tender; then take them out carefully and place them in your glass dish; in the meantime have one lemon sliced very thin, and boil it in a teacup of water, until tender, then add to the syrup; boil up once or twice and pour over the apples.
A stewed apple compote in lemon syrup, meant to be served cold in a glass dish. Almost everything hangs on lifting the apples out the moment they turn tender.
- Coffee sugarA coarse-crystal sugar sold in the 19th century for sweetening coffee, not a coffee-flavored product; grades varied and it was not always pure white. Plain granulated sugar is the substitute; half a pound is a generous cup (about 1 1/8 cups).
- Preserving kettleA wide pan, usually brass or copper and later enameled iron, broad enough that fruit need not be crowded. Use your widest saucepan or a straight-sided skillet, and poach the quarters in two batches rather than crowding them.
- A teacup of waterPeriod teacups are inconsistent, reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 8 fl oz; read this as roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup. It is only a vehicle for softening the lemon, and some of it will boil away.
- The hingeApple quarters can go from firm to collapsing quickly. Keep the syrup at a bare simmer, start testing with a skewer after a few minutes, and lift each quarter out with a slotted spoon the moment it yields.
- Choice of appleThe recipe assumes a firm cooking apple that holds its shape. Braeburn, Golden Delicious, or Granny Smith work; McIntosh and similar soft varieties turn to sauce in the kettle.
- The lemonSlice it paper-thin, peel and all, and discard the seeds. The preliminary boil is what makes the rind edible rather than harshly bitter, so do not shorten it; the slices should be limp before they join the syrup.
- Finishing the syrupA quart of water and half a pound of sugar gives a thin syrup. The original simply adds the lemon water and boils up once or twice; if you want it thicker you can reduce it after the apples come out, but that is a departure from the recipe as written.
- ServingPour the syrup over the fruit; dishes of this kind were usually served cold, though the recipe does not say so. Eight apples fill a large glass bowl and would serve roughly six to eight.
Cold stewed fruit belongs to the 19th-century supper table, the light evening meal that followed a heavy midday dinner and called for something sweet but not baked. Apples kept in the cellar all winter, and imported lemons were a common household means of putting acid and perfume into an otherwise plain dish; pairings of the two are frequent in recipes of the period. The instruction to arrange the fruit in "your glass dish" is a period detail worth noting: pressed glassware had been mass-produced in America since the middle of the century and was within reach of ordinary households, and a compote in clear glass, with the translucent lemon slices showing through the syrup, would have served as table decoration as much as dessert. The name is simply the two ingredients, in the flat descriptive style these books used for fruit dishes.