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APPLES (a la Marie)
Pare some large, firm apples, and scoop out the core without dividing them. Fill the cavity with cream or custard. Cover each apple with a little short crust, with a sort of knot or bow at the top, and bake in a moderate oven. Serve with sifted sugar. Time to bake, half an hour. Sufficient, one for each person. Probable cost, 2d. each.
A dumpling by another name: whole cored apples jacketed in shortcrust and baked with a custard centre. Two things decide whether it works — the apple variety and the thickness of the filling.
- Use a thick custard, not creamCustard holds better than cream -- the original allows either, but pouring cream tends to thin and work its way out of the pastry seams as the apple releases juice. A stiff pastry cream (egg yolks, sugar, cornflour, milk) cooked and cooled first is more likely to stay put and set under the crust.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. The pastry knot on top will colour before the apple is done, so tent loosely with foil once it is golden.
- Half an hour is optimisticA whole large apple in a pastry case needs 45 to 55 minutes at 350F before the flesh is tender to a skewer through the top. The original timing suits only small apples or a hotter oven.
- Apple choice"Large, firm" is the operative instruction. A cooking apple such as Bramley will slump into sauce inside its crust; Braeburn, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious or Honeycrisp hold their shape for the full bake.
- CoringAn apple corer taken from the stem end, stopping short of the base, leaves a sealed well for the custard. Punch right through and the filling runs out onto the tray.
- The knot on topRoll the crust thin, wrap each apple, trim the excess at the crown and twist or plait the scraps into the ornamental bow. Brush with beaten egg or milk before baking so it browns.
- Pan and spacingBake on a lined, rimmed tray with an inch between apples; juice will escape somewhere. Serve warm rather than hot, dusted with icing sugar (the "sifted sugar" of the original).
- YieldOne apple per person, as stated, at a probable cost of 2d. each.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery is arranged alphabetically like a reference work, so "Apples" runs to dozens of numbered and named variations, of which this is one of the dressier. The formula is the British apple dumpling — a whole apple in a pastry jacket, a farmhouse pudding of long standing — given a French title and a custard filling to lift it into the late-Victorian dessert course; "à la Marie" and similar tags were applied freely by nineteenth-century compilers without any consistent reference to a particular Marie. The costing in pence per portion is characteristic of Cassell's, which was written for households keeping an eye on the weekly books, and the appearance of pastry crust, cream and sifted sugar around a single cheap apple shows the period's habit of dressing plain fruit up rather than serving it as it came.