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Apple Black Caps
Take a few firm, juicy apples, pare them, and take out the cores without breaking the apples. Fill the hollow of each with some pounded sugar and one or two cloves. Place them in a shallow dish with a little sweet wine, sugar to taste, and a little lemon-rind, a few cloves, or any flavouring that may be preferred. Let them stew slowly in the oven until the apples are soft throughout, but do not let them break, and when they are sufficiently done, heat the tops with a salamander, to make them look black. They may be served hot or cold, and will keep some days. Time, about half an hour to bake. One will suffice for each person.
A straightforward baked apple, distinguished only by the scorched top that gives it its name. Two things decide whether it works: the variety of apple and the heat you use at the end.
- The hinge: the apples must not collapseChoose a variety that holds its shape under long heat -- Braeburn, Pink Lady, Golden Delicious or Boskoop. A Bramley or other cooking apple will froth up and burst, which is exactly what the recipe forbids.
- Oven heatCassell's "stew slowly in the oven" points to a slow to moderate oven; no temperature is given, so anything in the region of 300-325F/150-165C is a modern reading. Much hotter and the wine caramelises to a scorch before the centres soften.
- The timing is optimisticHalf an hour suits only small apples. Medium to large ones need 40 to 60 minutes; test with a skewer through the shoulder, which should meet no resistance.
- The salamanderA salamander was an iron plate on a handle, heated red in the fire and held over food to brown it. A domestic grill or broiler set high for two or three minutes does the same, and a blowtorch does it faster with less risk of overcooking the fruit. The tops should blister and darken, not carbonise.
- Sweet wineA sweet sherry, Madeira, Marsala or a Muscat all work; use about a third of a cup for four apples, enough to film the dish and keep the bottoms from sticking. Baste once or twice during baking.
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar -- caster or superfine sugar is the modern equivalent. Granulated is fine here since it dissolves in the fruit juices anyway.
- ClovesWhole cloves, one or two per apple pushed into the sugar in the cavity; the recipe also scatters a few in the dish itself. They are potent, so err low if you are unused to them.
- Keeping"Will keep some days" assumed a cold larder. Covered in the refrigerator they hold three or four days, and the syrup thickens as they sit.
- YieldOne apple per person, as stated. Serve with cream, custard or thick yoghurt; the syrup left in the dish should be spooned over.
Black caps are a family of English baked-apple dishes that turn up under that name from the eighteenth century onwards, the "cap" being the darkened top of the fruit. In some versions the apples are halved and roasted cut side down so that the skin side blackens; here Cassell's keeps them whole and gets the colour artificially, with a salamander -- the red-hot iron plate that served as a Victorian kitchen's broiler. The dish belongs to the large class of nineteenth-century sweets built around the fact that a well-stocked household had apples in the loft from autumn to spring, and that a little sweet wine and a few cloves would make them worth serving at table.