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Apple Fool
Take two pounds of apples pared and cored. Put them into a saucepan with a cupful of water, one or two cloves, and sugar to taste. Let them simmer till quite soft, and beat them well with a wooden spoon. Mix with them, gradually, a pint of new milk, or milk and cream, boiled and allowed to become cold, sweetened and flavoured. Time to simmer the apples, about half an hour. Probable cost, made with milk, 8d. Sufficient for four persons.
A plain fruit fool of the kind Cassell's puts in its teaching section: a fruit purée slackened with cold sweetened milk or cream. Two details decide whether it works — the purée must be cold before the milk goes in, and the two must be combined gradually.
- The hinge: cold into coldApple pur e milk to a warm pur e recipe is explicit that the milk should be boiled and allowed to become cold; letting the apples cool too, and adding the milk a little at a time with a stirring rather than whisking action, is the safe reading.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured. Boiling would also have helped untreated milk keep a little longer; with pasteurised milk the step can be skipped, though scalding and cooling may thicken the result slightly. Milk alone gives a thin, drinkable fool; half milk and half double cream gives a richer one.
- QuantitiesA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so about 2 cups. "A cupful" of water is not a standard measure; read it as a teacupful, somewhere in the region of 5 to 8 fl oz. "Two pounds of apples pared and cored" does not make clear whether the weight is before or after preparation; if before, expect roughly 1 of usable fruit.
- Which applesA cooking apple that collapses — Bramley, or any tart variety that falls to a fluff — saves you the beating. Eating apples such as Gala hold their shape and will need mashing or a quick blitz. Sugar to taste means judging after the fruit is soft, since tart apples can take 4 to 6 tablespoons.
- Simmering timeHalf an hour is generous for pared, cored, sliced apples in a covered pan; a Bramley is usually soft in 12 to 15 minutes. Cook uncovered at the end if the purée looks watery, or the fool will be loose.
- Cloves and flavouringOne or two whole cloves is right — three will dominate. Fish them out before beating. "Flavoured" in the milk means the period's usual choices: a strip of lemon peel or a vanilla pod infused during boiling, or a grating of nutmeg.
- Yield and servingFour small glasses or cups. Chill at least an hour before serving, and offer thin crisp biscuits or sponge fingers alongside; the fool is soft enough to want something to bite.
- That 8dThe costings run through Cassell's as a housekeeping aid. Eightpence for a pudding for four was cheap food, and the figure is a period marker rather than anything to convert.
The fool is one of the oldest surviving English sweet dishes, recorded from the sixteenth century, and the name is generally traced to the sense of "fool" as a trifle or something of no consequence itself; the frequently repeated link to French fouler, to crush, is a folk etymology with no good evidence behind it. Early fools were often little more than cream, sugar and a flavouring, with fruit becoming more usual later; gooseberry is the classic, and apple served as the winter version, keeping apples being among the few fruits a household could count on from autumn through spring.