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Apple Puffs
Stew some apples with lemon-juice and sugar until they become a dry jam. Make a light sweet crust; stamp it out in small rounds, with an inner round marked, but not cut quite through. Bake them in a quick oven, take a little of the pastry out of the middle, and put the apples in its place. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour. Sufficient, one for each person. Probable cost, 1d. each.
A Victorian vol-au-vent in miniature: pastry cases baked blind, hollowed, and filled with thick apple compote. The whole thing hinges on how dry the apple gets.
- "Dry jam" is the whole recipeCook peeled, sliced apples with sugar and lemon juice over low heat, uncovered, until the mixture holds a mounded shape on the spoon and no liquid runs out when you drag a spatula through it — 20 to 40 minutes depending on the apples. Any wetness and the pastry collapses. Bramleys or another cooking apple break down fastest; eating apples need mashing or a brief blitz.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F (200-230C). High heat suits a rich short or puff crust, setting the layers before the butter melts out.
- "Light sweet crust"Probably a sweetened short crust rather than a laminated puff, though the text does not say and puff pastry works, rising more dramatically. Chill the stamped rounds for 20 minutes before baking so they hold their shape.
- The inner roundCut through the full round with one cutter, then press a smaller cutter about two-thirds of the way down into the centre without severing it. After baking, lift the inner disc off as a lid and scoop out any soft pastry beneath, as instructed.
- Fifteen minutesAccurate for small cases at that heat. Judge by colour: deep golden, and the sides firm enough not to buckle when you lift the lid.
- Fill warm, serve soonThe apple goes in after baking, so the pastry never gets a chance to crisp again. These want eating within an hour or two; filled and left overnight they go leathery.
- Quantities and costThe original gives no amounts at all. Reckon roughly 1 lb of apples, 3–4 oz sugar and the juice of half a lemon to fill about eight 3-inch cases, from a pound of pastry. The "1d. each" is a late-Victorian price point, not a measure.
The entry reads as a demonstration of the pastry case, stamped and marked so the centre lifts out as a lid, which the Victorian kitchen applied to everything from oyster patties to jam. The technique is the small domestic cousin of the vol-au-vent, generally traced to early nineteenth-century French pâtisserie and thoroughly naturalised in English cookery by the 1870s. What dates the entry most precisely is the "probable cost, 1d. each" — Cassell's was written for households where the mistress costed a dish before ordering it, and a penny apiece marked this as an economical way to end a family dinner rather than a company dish. The dry-jam filling answers a practical need: the apples are cooked down hard with sugar and lemon so that the jam does not make the pastry soggy.