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APPLES (a la Cherbourg)
Choose firm but good boiling apples. Pare them, and cut them into bricks. Put a pound of sugar, the thickly-peeled rind of two lemons, and a little ginger, to every pound of apples, and cover them closely for some hours. Then place them in a preserving-pan, being careful not to break the apples, and put to them half a cupful of cider. Let them boil until the apples look quite clear, then remove them one by one to a dish. When cold, place them in cross piles, and crown the whole with the lemon-peel. Pour the syrup round, and eat with Devonshire cream. Time to boil, about twenty minutes. Probable cost of apples cooked this way, 10d. per pound.
This is a candied apple preserve rather than a stewed pudding: equal weights of sugar and fruit, a long cold maceration, then a short boil that leaves the pieces translucent and intact. Everything depends on the apples holding their shape.
- The hinge: keep the pieces wholeThe apples must go into the pan unbroken and be lifted out one by one, so choose a variety that holds together — Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Cox or a firm russet. A Bramley or other true "boiling" apple will collapse into sauce within minutes, whatever the original says about boiling apples.
- "Cut them into bricks"Rectangular blocks cut from the cheeks of a pared apple; the recipe gives no dimensions and does not mention coring, though the cores must come out. The shape is the point: the finished pieces are stacked in crossed piles like a woodpile or a log stack.
- Sugar in equal weightA pound of sugar to a pound of apples is preserve proportion, not dessert proportion. The hours under cover draw juice from the fruit and start the syrup before any heat is applied — do not shorten this stage or there will be nothing to boil in but half a cup of cider.
- CiderIn an English book of this period cider means the fermented drink, dry and alcoholic, not American sweet cider. A dry still cider is closest; most of the alcohol cooks off in the boiling.
- Ginger, unspecifiedThe original gives no form or quantity. Bruised fresh root ginger, a thumb-sized piece per pound, is the likeliest reading for a syrup like this and can be fished out with the lemon peel; ground ginger would cloud it.
- Thickly-peeled lemon rindPared in wide strips with a little pith attached, so it candies in the syrup and survives to be piled on top as the "crown". Thin zest would disintegrate.
- Preserving-panA wide, heavy, shallow pan — a large sauté pan or a maslin pan. Width matters more than depth here, both for evaporation and so the pieces can lie in one layer and be lifted out without breaking.
- Twenty minutes is a guideJudge by appearance, not the clock: the apples are done when they look glassy right through. Small pieces in a wide pan may reach that point in twelve minutes. If they clear before the syrup has thickened, remove the fruit and reduce the syrup on its own.
- Devonshire cream and yieldDevonshire cream -- Devonshire cream is clotted cream, sold in tubs in Britain and in some specialist shops elsewhere; thick unsweetened whipped cream or cru00me fraîche stands in. The recipe gives no total quantity: it is written as proportions per pound of apples, so scale to the number you are feeding.
Cassell's belonged to the great age of dishes named after places, and it is tempting to read the name as doing real work: Cherbourg sits on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy, the cider country of France, and one might take the half-cupful of cider in the syrup for a Norman signature — though nothing in the recipe links the two beyond inference. What follows is thoroughly English, though — a preserve boiled to clearness in a preserving-pan, built into architectural piles, and served with clotted cream from Devon. The pairing of apples and West Country cream is a neat piece of Victorian cross-Channel cooking, of the kind that filled dictionaries of cookery aimed at households with a cook and a copper pan. The costing — tenpence a pound — is characteristic of Cassell's, which gave a probable cost for nearly every dish, and it reflects a time when sugar had become cheap enough to use pound for pound with fruit without comment.