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Apples, Buttered
Pare and core without breaking a dozen golden pippins. Cut pieces of bread in rounds large enough for an apple to stand upon, and place them in a well-buttered dish with an apple upon each. Fill the holes with butter and sugar. Bake them in a gentle oven until tender, then put them upon a hot dish with a little apricot jam on the top of each, and cover with sifted sugar. Time to bake, thirty minutes. Probable cost, 10d. Allow one for each person.
A straightforward baked apple set on a fried-bread base — the Victorian ancestor of apple charlotte in single portions. Two things decide whether it works: the apple variety and keeping the bread from going soggy.
- Golden pippinsA small, firm, sharp English dessert apple, now effectively a collector's variety and not sold commercially. Bramley collapses to purée in this treatment; use a modest-sized apple that holds shape, such as Braeburn, Honeycrisp or a small Golden Delicious, about 5-6 oz each.
- "A gentle oven"Conventionally read as something in the region of 300-325F, though the book gives no temperature. The apples are pared, so the point is simply that they should soften through gradually rather than colour and collapse before the centres give.
- Coring without breakingAn apple corer taken from the stem end only, leaving the base intact, makes a cup that holds the butter and sugar. If you go straight through, the filling runs out onto the bread.
- The bread roundsCut from a firm white loaf a day old, about half an inch thick, and butter both faces generously — the original relies on the well-buttered dish plus butter draining from the apple. Some cooks fry the rounds in butter first, which guarantees a crisp base.
- Filling quantitiesThe recipe gives none. Roughly a teaspoon of butter and a teaspoon of sugar per apple fills the cavity; more simply overflows.
- Timing checkThirty minutes suits small apples. Test with a skewer through the side rather than the top, and pull them the moment they yield — held longer they slump off the bread.
- Apricot jamWarm and sieve it so it spoons on as a glaze rather than a lump. "Sifted sugar" means sugar passed through a sieve; a fine caster or icing sugar is the nearest modern equivalent.
- Yield and costTwelve apples, one per person. "10d" is ten old pence, pre-decimal currency — a shilling was twelve pence, so the whole dish cost just under a shilling.
Its form — fruit baked on a butter-soaked bread base — belongs to the same family as apple charlotte, where bread lines the mould instead of sitting under the fruit. The golden pippin named here is worth noting: it was one of the most celebrated English apples of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, small, russeted and briskly flavoured, and it appears constantly in period cookery books before falling out of orchards as larger commercial varieties took over. The apricot jam and dusting of sugar are the standard Victorian finish for a baked fruit dish, doing the work of both glaze and garnish.