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Apple Chartreuse
Boil gently a cupful of the best rice and a little finely-grated lemon-rind in a quart of milk, until the rice is tender and the milk absorbed in it; add sugar to taste. Then take eight or ten apples, and core without breaking them: put them in a dish with a little raspberry or red currant jam in each hollow, and place the rice between the apples until the dish is full. Brush the whole over with the white of an egg, and sift a little sugar over it. Bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, one hour. Sufficient for six persons. Probable cost, 1s.
A milk-rice pudding built around whole baked apples, and the two components cook at very different rates. Get the rice fully soft and thick before it goes near the oven, because the hour in the oven is for the apples, not the grain.
- The hinge: cook the rice through firstA quart of milk must be almost entirely absorbed by one cup of rice before assembly, which takes 35-45 minutes of very gentle simmering with frequent stirring. If the rice goes into the dish still chalky it will stay chalky, since there is no free liquid left in the dish to finish it.
- "A quick oven" for an hourQuick is usually rendered as somewhere around 400-450F, which is likely to scorch the egg-white glaze before the apples are tender. Brown it briefly at that heat, then drop to 350-375F for the remainder, or simply bake the whole thing at 350F and give it the full hour.
- Rice to useShort-grain pudding rice or Arborio gives the creamy, cohesive set the recipe depends on. Long-grain will cook to separate grains that collapse when the dish is turned out or spooned.
- Choosing applesEight to ten apples in one dish suggests smallish fruit, though the recipe never gives a dish size. Use a firm variety that holds its shape when baked - Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Pink Lady - as a Bramley or other cooking apple will burst and flood the rice.
- Coring without breakingAn apple corer taken down from the stem end, stopping short of the base, leaves a closed cavity for the jam. Peeling is not specified; leaving the skin on helps the apples hold together, though skins toughen and wrinkle in a long bake.
- The egg-white glazeOne egg white, lightly beaten to loosen it but not to a foam, brushed over the assembled surface and dusted with caster sugar. It sets to a thin pale crust and browns quickly, which is another reason to keep the heat moderate.
- Vessel and yieldA deep straight-sided baking dish, generously sized and just wide enough for the apples to stand upright and touch, with room for the rice from a quart of milk packed between them. Sufficient for six, as the recipe states.
- "Probable cost, 1s."One shilling for a dish feeding six - the kind of costing Cassell's attached to almost everything, meant for a cook working to a household budget rather than a price you can translate usefully.
Chartreuse in nineteenth-century cookery describes a dish built up in layers inside a mould or deep dish, usually with one element concealing another, and the name is generally traced to the Carthusian monks and the vegetable-based cookery associated with their abstinence from meat. By the time Cassell's was compiled the term had loosened to cover almost any moulded composition, savoury or sweet, and here it simply means whole apples hidden in a case of milk-boiled rice. The pairing is thoroughly Victorian: rice pudding was among the cheapest ways to turn a quart of milk into a filling course, and setting a few small apples into it with a spoonful of jam apiece turned a nursery staple into something that could be sent to table as a sweet.