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Apple Cakes
Take two pounds of apples, pare, core, and quarter them. Stew them gently with one pound of sugar, the juice and finely-chopped rind of a lemon, a table-spoonful of butter, and half a nutmeg grated. Beat these ingredients thoroughly together, and drop them in small rounds upon a sheet of well-oiled paper. Place them in a cool oven, and bake them until they are firm, which will take about a quarter of an hour. They should be kept in a tin box. Probable cost, 1s.
These are not cakes in any modern sense but sweetened apple paste dried into firm drops — closer to a fruit jelly or pâte de fruits than to anything with flour in it. The success of the thing is decided at the stewing stage, not in the oven.
- Reduce further than you thinkThe mixture must be cooked down until it is a stiff paste that holds its shape on the spoon and pulls away from the side of the pan, not a loose sauce. Two pounds of apples with a pound of sugar will take 30 to 45 minutes of gentle, frequent stirring to get there, and if it is still slack when you drop it out, the rounds will spread and never firm up.
- "A cool oven"In Victorian usage this is the tail end of the range, roughly 225-275F (110-135C). The point is to dry the drops, not to colour or set them.
- The quarter-hour is optimisticFifteen minutes will not dry sugared fruit paste in a cool oven unless the mixture was already very stiff and the rounds very small. Expect one to three hours, and judge by feel: they are done when the surface is dry and no longer tacky and the round lifts cleanly from the paper. A convection or fan setting, or the residual heat of an oven turned off after other baking, both work well here.
- Oiled paperUse parchment or a silicone mat instead. If you follow the original and oil the paper, use a neutral oil very sparingly — too much and the drops fry rather than dry at the base.
- ApplesA cooking apple that collapses is what is wanted — Bramley, Granny Smith, or any tart windfall. Dessert apples that hold their shape will need mashing or a quick pass with a stick blender before they will beat smooth.
- Half a nutmegThat is a forceful amount by current taste, roughly a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half of freshly grated nutmeg. A quarter of a nutmeg suits most palates; nutmeg from a jar is weaker still and will need more.
- StorageThe tin box is not decoration. These are hygroscopic and will go sticky in a humid kitchen or a sealed plastic tub; layer them between sheets of parchment or dust them with caster sugar and keep them airtight and dry. They will hold a month or more.
- Yield and costExpect roughly 40 to 50 small rounds, depending on how generously you drop them. The "probable cost, 1s" is a shilling in late-Victorian money — a costing convention Cassell's applied to almost every entry so a housekeeper could compare dishes.
Sweet-shop confections of this kind sit at the meeting point of preserving and dessert-making: before reliable refrigeration, fruit was routinely cooked with an equal or near-equal weight of sugar and then dried to a keeping paste, a technique documented in English household books for centuries under names like quiddany, marmalade (in its older, solid sense) and fruit paste. The word "cake" here carries its older meaning of a flat, formed round rather than a raised, floured batter — the same sense preserved in fish cake and oat cake. The method illustrates a general lesson: that sugar plus long evaporation makes fruit shelf-stable, and that the oven can be used as a drying chamber rather than a source of browning heat. Similar apple pastes remain in production across Europe, from Spanish and Portuguese fruit cheeses to French pâtes de fruits, all descended from the same preserving logic.