Home › The Principles of Cookery › Apples and Apricots, Chartreuse Of
Apples and Apricots, Chartreuse Of
Put a quart of new milk into a stewpan with a cupful of rice, the rind of a lemon or a little cinnamon, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and a piece of butter the size of a nut. Let it simmer gently until the milk is nearly all absorbed; then beat it well, and place a thick layer of it at the bottom of a well-buttered pie-dish. Pare and core half a dozen good-sized apples, but neither divide them nor open them quite through. Fill the cavity in each with a little butter and sugar. Arrange them in the dish, and pour the rest of the rice round them, making the whole smooth. Put the dish into a moderate oven, and when sufficiently cooked, put a large spoonful of apricot jam at the top of each apple. Serve with sifted sugar. Time to bake, forty minutes. Sufficient for six persons. Probable cost, 1s. 8d.
A baked rice pudding used as a case for whole apples, with apricot jam standing in for the fruit the name promises. Nothing here is difficult, but the rice stage decides everything.
- Stop the rice shortSimmer until the milk is nearly absorbed but the grains are still slack and creamy; it will finish cooking in the oven and will absorb more liquid from the apples. Rice cooked to dryness on the stove bakes into a solid, chalky wall.
- QuantitiesA quart of new milk is about 5 cups of whole milk (an imperial quart is 40 fl oz). "A cupful of rice" is presumably uncooked short-grain pudding rice, roughly 7 oz. "A piece of butter the size of a nut" is a small lump -- anywhere from a teaspoon to a tablespoon, depending on the nut intended.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 350F. Forty minutes suits medium cooking apples; test with a skewer through the side of an apple rather than trusting the clock.
- Choosing applesFirm eating apples such as Braeburn or Granny Smith hold their shape. Bramleys and other true cooking apples will collapse into froth and flood the rice.
- CoringThe instruction not to cut through is deliberate: leave the blossom end intact so the butter and sugar stay in the cavity instead of running into the pudding. An apple corer stopped short of the base does this well.
- Beat it wellBeating the hot rice breaks some of the grains and releases starch, which is what makes the mixture set smoothly rather than looking like loose boiled rice. A wooden spoon is enough.
- The jam goes on at the endAdd the apricot jam after baking, as the recipe directs, while everything is hot, so it slackens and glazes.
- YieldSix, as stated, one apple each, in a dish of about 9 to 10 inches. Best served warm; the rice stiffens considerably once cold.
A chartreuse in nineteenth-century cookery meant a moulded dish built in layers, the outer casing concealing what sat inside — originally a savoury construction of vegetables around game, and generally traced by name to the Carthusian monks and their meatless kitchens. By the time Cassell's was compiled the term had loosened to cover almost any dish in which one thing was enclosed by another, and sweet chartreuses of fruit set in rice or jelly appear in English cookery of the period. The rice casing here is doing the work that a nineteenth-century cook expected of it: making a small quantity of fruit and a spoonful of jam feed six people at a modest cost, which the book gives as a probable 1s. 8d. Apricots appear only as jam, fresh ones having a short and expensive season in Britain, while apricot preserve was widely used as a glaze for tarts and puddings.