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Apples, Stewed
Apples are very nice pared, cored, sliced, and gently stewed with a little white wine, sugar, and flavouring. They are quickly prepared, served with custard are a pleasant substitute for apple pie, and are an agreeable addition to the tea-table. They may be mixed with plums or other fruit. Time to stew, a quarter of an hour.
This is a method rather than a formula — Cassell's gives no quantities at all, so the proportions are yours to set. A working ratio is 1 lb apples, 1/2 cup white wine, 2-3 tablespoons sugar.
- The hinge: choose the apple for the texture you wantBramley, McIntosh and most cooking apples collapse into sauce within the quarter hour given here. If you want the slices to hold their shape for serving with custard, use Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Honeycrisp or another firm variety and cut the slices a good 1/4 inch thick.
- "Gently stewed" means a bare simmerA covered pan over low heat, the liquid barely moving. A rolling boil drives off the wine, scorches the sugar at the base and breaks the fruit down before it is cooked through.
- How much liquidEnough wine to come a third of the way up the fruit, not to cover it. The apples release a good deal of their own juice; too much liquid gives you poached apple in thin syrup rather than a stew.
- "Flavouring"The book leaves this open; likely candidates for a book of this date include a strip of lemon peel, a small piece of cinnamon stick, two or three cloves, or a spoonful of rosewater. Whole spices are worth using here rather than ground, since they can be lifted out before serving.
- The wineAny dry or off-dry white — the acidity matters more than the character. A cheap Riesling or Chenin suits the sugar well. Cider or apple juice with a squeeze of lemon substitutes cleanly if you would rather not use wine.
- TimingA quarter of an hour is right for firm apples in thick slices; check at ten minutes. They are done when a knife point meets no resistance but the slice still lifts whole from the pan.
- Served with custardThe book means a pouring custard — crème anglaise or a thin boiled custard, not the set baked kind. It is served warm or cold, over or beside the fruit.
- Mixing with plumsPlums cook faster than firm apples, and red- or purple-skinned kinds will tint the whole dish pink. Add them halved and stoned in the last five minutes.
- Yield1 lb of apples prepared this way serves three or four as a dish with custard, and keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator.
Stewed fruit occupies a particular place in late-Victorian household cookery: it is what you make when pastry is more trouble than the occasion warrants, and the book says so outright — "a pleasant substitute for apple pie." The tea-table reference places it precisely. Afternoon tea by the 1870s and 1880s had become a settled middle-class institution, and it needed dishes that could be prepared in advance, eaten from a small plate with a spoon, and set out cold alongside cake and bread and butter. The white wine suggests a comfortable kitchen rather than a frugal one; water would have served as well and cost nothing. That apples were the default fruit for it in Britain reflects both their long storage life — kept in a cool loft or fruit room, dessert and cooking varieties would see a household through to spring — and the fact that they need only sugar and a little acid to become a finished dish.