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APPLES (a l'Adeline)
Peel and core six large apples without slicing them. Cook them gently in the oven in a covered pie-dish with a little water till tender. Let them get cold, then dip them into a mixture made of two table-spoonfuls of flour, two of castor sugar, and half a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon. Beat up an egg, brush each apple over with it, then roll the apple up in fine cake crumbs, and fry to a golden colour in boiling fat. Drain on paper. Fill in the middle of each apple with a little jam, and put a little whipped cream on top. Serve cold with any nice fruit syrup. Cost, about 1s. 6d. for six persons.
A cold fried apple, filled with jam and capped with cream — closer to a fritter than a baked pudding. Nearly everything depends on getting the apples cold and dry before they go anywhere near egg or crumbs.
- The hinge: cold and dryBaked apples weep as they cool, and a wet surface will shed the flour dredge and the crumb coat in the fat. Chill them thoroughly, then blot them all over with kitchen paper before the flour goes on.
- Oven for the first cookingThe book says only 'gently in the oven' with 'a little water' in a covered dish, and gives no temperature or time. In a modern oven a moderate heat (roughly 325-350F) with a splash of water in the dish will get there; start checking after about half an hour, and take them out when a skewer goes in easily but the apples still hold their shape.
- Choose an apple that stays wholeA cooking apple that collapses to fluff, such as Bramley, will not survive coring, chilling, crumbing and frying. Use a firm eating apple — Braeburn, Granny Smith, Cox — and core it with an apple corer rather than a knife so the walls stay thick.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar. Ordinary granulated will work in a dry dredge, though it dissolves less readily on the damp surface.
- The flour mixture is a dredge, not a batterTwo tablespoons each of flour and sugar with the cinnamon is a dry coating you roll the apples in. Mix it in a shallow bowl and spoon it over the apple rather than trying to dip a heavy fruit.
- Cake crumbsFine crumbs from a plain sponge or Madeira cake, dried a little in a low oven. They brown faster than breadcrumbs because of the sugar in them, so watch the colour. Dry breadcrumbs are a workable substitute.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means deep fat at frying heat, around 350-360F. Any hotter and the sugary crumbs will darken before the coating sets. Each apple needs only a minute or two — it is already cooked.
- Finishing and yieldSix apples, six servings. Fill the cored centres with a stiff jam — apricot or raspberry — after frying and cooling, or it will run out in the fat. The "nice fruit syrup" can be thinned jam or a reduced fruit purée poured round the base.
- The cost line1s. 6d. for six is the book's own costing in pre-decimal currency, roughly threepence a head. It is a period price, not a guide to anything now.
French-styled names — à la plus a woman's name — were a common flourish in nineteenth-century English cookery writing, borrowed from menu French; who or what "Adeline" refers to here is not recorded. The dish itself belongs to a large family of fried-fruit sweets that ran from apple fritters up to elaborate crumbed and stuffed fruits, all of which suited a kitchen with a deep pan of fat already hot. The costing at the end places it among the many household books that priced a pudding per head for their readers.