Home › The Principles of Cookery › Apples, Stewed, in Halves
Apples, Stewed, in Halves
Pare, core, and halve half a dozen good-sized baking apples. Place them in a saucepan with three table-spoonfuls of sugar, a little water, the rind and juice of a lemon, and of an orange. Let them simmer gently until they are soft. Serve with the syrup strained and poured over them. Time to simmer, half an hour.
A plain compote that depends almost entirely on choosing the right apple and keeping the water low. Half an hour of simmering will reduce a soft dessert apple to sauce, which is not what is wanted here.
- The hinge: the apple"Baking apples" in a British book of this period would have meant a cooking rather than a dessert variety; some, such as Bramley, collapse readily, while russet types hold. For halves that keep their shape, use a firm apple like Braeburn, Honeycrisp or Golden Delicious and check at 12-15 minutes; reserve the full half hour for large, dense fruit.
- "A little water"Genuinely vague. Start with about 1/2 cup in a wide pan, enough to come a third of the way up the fruit; the apples release more as they soften, and the citrus juice adds liquid too.
- SugarThree tablespoons for six good-sized apples is modest, and will taste tart to modern palates used to sweetened compotes. Taste the syrup near the end and adjust rather than adding more at the start.
- Rind and juicePare the rind in wide strips with a peeler, avoiding the white pith, so it can be lifted out or caught in the straining. Grated zest will cloud the syrup and cling to the fruit.
- Pan and arrangementUse a wide, shallow pan and set the halves cut side down in a single layer; stacked fruit steams unevenly and the lower layer turns to pulp. Cover loosely and do not stir, only baste.
- Straining and reducingLift the apples out with a slotted spoon before straining, then boil the syrup down for a few minutes if it is thin. Pour it over while still warm so it glazes.
- Yield and servingSix apples serves six as a dessert course, or four generously. Cream, custard or plain yogurt suits it; it is also good cold the next day, when the syrup will have set a little from the apple pectin.
Stewed apples in halves belong to the large family of plain fruit "stews" and compotes that filled out the sweet course in ordinary Victorian households, where apples kept in a cool store from autumn well into spring and needed using up. The recipe demonstrates the basic method of simmering fruit in a light syrup rather than anything remarkable in the dish itself: master this and the same procedure serves pears, quinces and plums. The lemon and orange are doing real work, supplying both acidity and the aromatic lift that a store apple loses over months in the loft, and the pairing of the two citrus rinds is a common Victorian flavouring for cooked fruit. The syrup is strained before pouring, which gives the finished dish a clear, glossy look at table.