Home › The Principles of Cookery › Apples, Frosted
Apples, Frosted
Take enough apples-pippins will be best for the purpose-to fill a dessert-dish. Simmer them gently in a pan of cold water, with a small piece of alum, and a few vine-leaves between and over them. When the skins can be easily pulled off with the fingers remove them, and have ready some clarified butter in which to dip each one as it is peeled. Strew with crushed white sugar, and bake in a slow oven. The sugar, if carefully done, will sparkle as if frosted. When quite cold place them on a glass dish, piling them high. They should simmer about ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per dozen.
A Victorian dessert-course trick: whole apples poached until the skins slip, buttered, sugared and dried in a cool oven until the coating glitters. Two of its ingredients no longer belong in a domestic kitchen.
- The alum, and why to leave it outPotassium alum was the standard firming agent for fruit, keeping the flesh from collapsing during the simmer. The dose here is unmeasured ("a small piece"), and alum has largely disappeared from home cooking; omit it and simply undercook the apples slightly instead. Firm, tart fruit will hold its shape without help.
- Vine leavesFresh grape leaves were laid over fruit to green it and to keep it under the water. They contribute nothing to flavour here. Brined vine leaves from a jar will work if you want the effect; rinse them well, as they are heavily salted.
- PippinsA pippin was any apple raised from seed rather than grafted, but by the nineteenth century the word usually meant a firm keeping apple such as the Newtown or Ribston. A firm eating apple such as Braeburn or Pink Lady will hold together the same way.
- "A slow oven"Roughly 275-300F/140-150C. The apples are not being baked so much as dried, so the sugar sets to a crisp glitter rather than melting to syrup. Allow 30 to 45 minutes and watch for the surface going matte and sparkling.
- Simmer, then skinTen minutes from cold water is enough for the skins to slip; the flesh should still be firm to a skewer. Overcooking at this stage guarantees a dish of collapsed apples, since they still have the oven ahead of them.
- Clarified butterOrdinary melted butter carries milk solids that brown and dull the finish. Clarify it, or use ghee, and dip each hot apple so the butter sets thin. The sugar must go on while the butter is still tacky or it will not adhere.
- Crushed white sugarCaster or superfine sugar. Loaf sugar was often broken and pounded to this fineness in the nineteenth-century kitchen; granulated is too coarse and will not frost evenly.
- Yield and servingThe cost is quoted per dozen, and a dozen will fill a dessert dish. They must be completely cold before piling, or the frosted surface will weep and the pyramid will slump.
Frosted apples belong to the Victorian dessert course, the sweet display set out after the cloth was drawn, where appearance counted for as much as flavour and food was piled high on glass and silver to catch the candlelight. The alum-and-vine-leaf treatment is older than the dish itself: it comes from the preserving tradition, where alum firmed fruit against long cooking and vine leaves were used to keep greengages and gherkins green, a practice generally traced back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century still-room manuals. Cassell's, published for a large middle-class readership, characteristically ends the entry with a price, one shilling and sixpence a dozen, so a housekeeper could weigh the cost of an ornamental dish against the rest of the week's marketing.