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Apple Hedgehog
Take two dozen large apples, pared and cored: boil them to a smooth jam, sweetened and flavoured with essence of almonds. Pare one dozen and a half more, scoop out the cores, and boil them in sugar and water until tender. Take them gently out of the saucepan, and fill the hollow in the middle of each with any bright-coloured jam, and arrange them on a dish, in two or three layers, as nearly as possible in the form of a hedgehog. Fill the empty space with the jam, and make all smooth. Cover the whole with sugar icing, and stick almonds blanched and split thickly over it. Place the dish in a good oven, to make the apples hot and brown the almonds. Time to simmer, about half an hour. Sufficient for eight persons. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A Victorian showpiece pudding: whole poached apples banked into a mound over apple marmalade, iced and spiked with split almonds. The construction matters more than the cooking, and nothing here is difficult once the two apple preparations are treated as separate jobs.
- The hinge: two kinds of appleThe jam base wants a variety that collapses — Bramley, or any cooking apple that froths apart — while the eighteen whole apples must hold their shape after poaching and handling. Use a firm eating apple such as Braeburn or Cox for those; a Bramley poached whole will burst and the hedgehog will slump.
- Essence of almondsIn the Victorian period this generally meant an essence derived from bitter almonds. Use modern almond extract, and sparingly: a quarter teaspoon for two dozen apples is plenty.
- "A good oven"Read as a fairly hot oven, but the apples are already cooked; the oven is only there to warm the assembly through and colour the almonds, which takes a matter of minutes. Watch it — split almonds go from gold to bitter quickly.
- Sugar icingMost likely a royal-style icing: egg white beaten with sifted icing sugar to a spreadable paste. It should be thick enough to stay put on a domed surface, and it wants to be applied to apples that have cooled, or it will slide.
- Poaching the whole applesA light syrup, roughly a cup of sugar to two cups of water, at a bare simmer. The half hour given is for large apples; test at 15 minutes with a skewer and lift them out the moment they yield, using a slotted spoon and a good deal of patience.
- CoringScoop the cores from the whole apples without going through the base, so the jam filling stays in. An apple corer worked from the stem end and stopped short, or a melon baller, does this better than a knife.
- Scale and yieldForty-two apples is a great deal — this is a table centrepiece for eight at a formal dinner, not a weeknight pudding. Halving the whole apples to nine or ten and building a single tier over the marmalade gives a manageable dish for four to six.
- Probable cost2s. 6d. is half a crown, a real outlay for a pudding at the time and a signal that this was company food.
Hedgehog puddings were a recurring conceit of the English dessert table from the eighteenth century onward, the point being that a mound of something soft, bristled all over with split blanched almonds, reads unmistakably as the animal. Earlier versions were built on a base of ground almonds, sometimes served with cream or custard around them; the apple form appears in the nineteenth century, by which time sugar and orchard fruit were cheap enough for large moulded fruit dishes to be practical in middle-class households. Cassell's was aimed at the cook of a modest establishment who was nonetheless expected to produce something worth looking at when there were guests, and the recipe's real subject is presentation: the jam is structural, the icing is a smooth ground for the quills, and the oven does almost no cooking at all. The convention of turning a pudding into a recognisable creature — hedgehogs, porcupines, tipsy cakes stuck with almonds — faded along with the elaborate multi-course dinner that supported it.