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Apple Birds' Nests
Choose six large apples, the same size, peel and remove the cores, place them apart in a large pie-dish. Put in each apple a clove and as much sifted sugar as it will hold. Put in the pie-dish two tea-cupfuls of water, the juice and peel of one lemon, and some more sugar. Put it in a slow oven with a dish over. As each apple is done put it in the glass in which it is to be served, the hollow-side uppermost. Strain the juice into a stew-pan, add half an ounce of soaked gelatine to it, and more sugar if not sweet enough. Simmer until dissolved, colour with cochineal, strain into a jug, let it cool, then pour round the apples. When set, fill each apple with apricot jam, and cover with whipped cream. Probable cost,1s. 6d.
A Victorian moulded dessert: baked apples set in a lemon jelly, filled with jam and crowned with cream. Nothing here is difficult, but the jelly is where it succeeds or fails.
- The hinge: bake the apples whole and just tenderThey have to hold their shape well enough to sit upright in a glass and take a filling. Pull them the moment a skewer goes through with slight resistance; a collapsed apple cannot be a nest.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'slow' is usually taken as somewhere around 300F (150C). The apples are steaming under cover rather than roasting, so the low heat is deliberate.
- "A dish over"Simply an inverted dish or plate used as a lid to trap steam. Foil does the same job.
- TeacupfulsA Victorian teacup runs about 5-6 fl oz, so two cupfuls is roughly 1 1/4 cups (300 ml). With the apple juices it will yield somewhat more by the time it is strained.
- GelatineHalf an ounce is about 14 g, or roughly two standard powdered sachets' worth by weight but closer to seven leaves. That is a firm set for around 400-450 ml of liquid, which is what you want if the jelly is to support the apples. Soak leaves in cold water and squeeze; bloom powder in a little cold liquid before warming.
- Do not boil the jellySimmer only until the gelatine has dissolved. Prolonged boiling weakens the set and clouds the syrup.
- CochinealA red colouring made from the dried insect Dactylopius coccus, still sold as carmine or E120. Any red food colouring works; a few drops only, since the point is a pale rose, not scarlet.
- ClovesOne whole clove per apple is assertive in a cold dessert. Remove them before filling with jam unless you want a diner to bite one.
- Assembly and yieldServes six, one glass each. Chill the jelly until cool but still pourable before it goes round the apples, or hot syrup will slump the fruit. Fill and top with whipped cream only just before serving.
Cassell's ran to thousands of entries and had a fondness for dishes named after what they resembled at table: the hollowed apple is the nest, the apricot jam the eggs, the whipped cream the down. The construction belongs to the late-Victorian dinner-party repertoire, when cheap commercial gelatine had made jellies and moulded sweets available to middle-class kitchens that could not run to a confectioner. The "probable cost" of 1s. 6d. is typical of the book's habit of pricing every dish so a housekeeper could budget a menu in advance. Cochineal, then the standard red for kitchen use, had been imported from Mexico since the sixteenth century and remained the respectable alternative to the coal-tar dyes that were beginning to worry public analysts.