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APPLES (a la Portugaise)
Peel and core, without dividing, half a dozen large baking apples. Put into a stewpan a cupful of sugar and a cupful of water, place it on the fire, and when the scum rises, put the apples in, and let them simmer very gently until they are tender throughout. Lay them in a glass dish, colour the syrup with a few drops of prepared cochineal, and pour it round them, and lay on the top of each apple a spoonful of bright-coloured jam. Time to boil the apples, twenty minutes or more. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A simple poached-apple dessert that lives or dies on the apples holding their shape. Everything else is syrup and decoration.
- The hinge: barely a simmerThe syrup should tremble rather than bubble; a rolling boil will burst the apples and leave you with sauce. Keep the pan uncovered on the lowest workable heat and turn the fruit once or twice with a spoon rather than a fork.
- Choosing the apples"Baking apples" in a British book of this date meant a sharp cooking variety rather than one named sort; Bramley's Seedling was only beginning to be sold widely in this period, and any of the cookers then in use will collapse readily. For whole poached fruit that keeps its outline, a firmer variety is safer. The recipe allows twenty minutes or more; test with a skewer at the shoulder.
- Coring without dividingAn apple corer pushed straight down from the stem end leaves the fruit intact and gives a well for the jam. Peel first, then core, and drop the apples into acidulated water while you bring the syrup up so they do not brown.
- The syrupEqual cups of sugar and water is a light stock syrup, roughly 200 g sugar to 240 ml water. One cup of each will not cover six large apples in a wide pan, so use a deep, narrow pan or make one and a half times the quantity and baste as they cook.
- Skimming"When the scum rises" simply means the moment the syrup comes to the boil and throws up a grey foam from impurities in the sugar. Modern refined sugar produces almost none; take the syrup to a boil, skim if anything appears, and add the fruit.
- Prepared cochinealThis was a liquid carmine colouring sold by grocers and chemists, made from the dried scale insect Dactylopius coccus. Carmine is still sold as a food colour (E120) and is neither vegetarian nor vegan; a few drops of any red food colouring, or a spoonful of redcurrant or raspberry jelly stirred into the hot syrup, gives the same effect.
- Reducing the syrupLift the apples out into the serving dish first, then boil the remaining syrup hard for a few minutes to thicken it before colouring and pouring round. The book does not say to, but poaching liquid is always thinner than it looks in the pan.
- The jam and the dish"Bright-coloured" means apricot, raspberry or redcurrant, warmed slightly so it sits rather than sags. Serve at room temperature or chilled, with cream; a glass dish shows off the coloured syrup, which is presumably why one is called for.
- Cost and yieldNinepence is pre-decimal currency, useful only as a period marker. The stated five or six portions is accurate for six large apples.
Nineteenth-century English cookery attached à la portugaise to a scattering of unrelated dishes, usually meaning tomato in savoury cooking and, in sweets, something coloured and glossy; the connection to Portugal is nominal rather than documented, and the book offers no explanation. What the recipe really represents is the Victorian compote — fruit poached whole in sugar syrup, arranged in a glass dish and made to look expensive. Cochineal, imported from Mexico and the Canaries and sold ready-prepared in small bottles, was the standard domestic red before coal-tar dyes took over, and it turns up throughout books of this period tinting blancmanges, ices and syrups. The dish belongs to a household with a garden or a cheap greengrocer and a shelf of jam: a few pence of apples dressed up into something fit to carry to the table. Presentation did the work that ingredients could not afford to.