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Apples, Red Hot
Take a quantity of Keswick codlings, pared, cored, and cut in quarters. Stew them in a little water, but not so long as to allow them to become pulp. Sweeten amply with pounded loaf sugar, and flavour to taste, with cayenne pepper; colour with cochineal. APPLES (RED) WITH JELLY. Take half a dozen very fine apples. Pare and core without dividing them, and put them in a saucepan with a pint of water, the rind of a lemon, and half a pound of loaf sugar. Place them on the fire and stew them very gently until the apples are quite tender, then lift them out and lay them in a glass dish. Boil the sugar and water with a little melted isinglass to make it set, then strain it, and add a few drops of prepared cochineal, and put it aside. When it is quite cold, lay it in rock-like pieces among the apples, and garnish the dish with springs of myrtle, the white of egg beaten to a froth, etc., etc. Time to simmer the apples, about three-quarters of an hour. This forms a very pretty supper dish. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, 1s.
Two related dishes run together: a stewed apple compote made hot with cayenne, and whole poached apples set among fragments of ruby jelly. Both are Victorian supper-table pieces, built for colour as much as flavour.
- Keswick codlingsA sharp early cooking apple, generally traced to Lancashire in the late eighteenth century and still grown by specialists. Bramley, Grenadier or any firm tart cooker stands in; avoid eating apples, which will not hold shape or acidity.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken off as needed, hence "pounded" for the first recipe. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight.
- The cayenneNot an error: the recipe asks for it explicitly. Sweetened stewed apple with a lick of cayenne turns up in Victorian cookery writing, the heat standing in for spice. Start with a pinch in the whole pan and taste; the original's "to taste" is doing real work here.
- CochinealCarmine, made from dried scale insects, sold in Victorian kitchens as a liquid "prepared cochineal". Still available as carmine or E120, though it is not vegetarian; any red food colouring gives the same effect.
- IsinglassA setting agent from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, now essentially a brewer's product. Use leaf or powdered gelatine instead. The recipe gives no quantity, so judge it by the pint of syrup and set it firmly enough to break into rock-like pieces rather than wobble.
- Simmering timeThree-quarters of an hour will reduce most modern cooking apples to sauce, which defeats the whole point of serving them whole. Poach at a bare tremble and start testing at 15 minutes; 20 to 25 is usually plenty.
- Reducing the syrupAfter the apples come out, the pint of poaching liquid needs boiling down before it will set well and taste of anything. Strain out the lemon rind before adding gelatine, not after.
- The garnishMyrtle sprigs are decorative only and should be lifted off before eating. The frothed raw egg white is best left out altogether; whipped cream or a meringue does the same job on the plate without uncooked egg.
- Yield and costThe jelly dish serves five or six. The "probable cost, 1s." is a shilling in pre-decimal money, the kind of note Cassell's added so a cook could price a menu.
The same stewed apple appears in many Victorian books, but here it is pushed toward the spectacular by pepper in one version and by broken red jelly, myrtle and egg-white froth in the other. Both depend on things that were cheap and startling in a nineteenth-century kitchen -- that is, refined sugar fine enough to pound, cayenne, and prepared cochineal, the insect-derived red that coloured everything from blancmange to sweets before coal-tar dyes took over later in the century. Isinglass, the fish-derived setting agent, was the standard clear jelly-maker before commercial powdered gelatine became reliable and cheap. The Keswick Codlin itself was a workhorse of English orchards, valued for cooking to a froth early in the season, which makes the instruction not to let it become pulp the hardest part of the recipe.