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Apples with Custard, Pancake Of
Pare, core, and slice four good-sized apples. Fry them in butter, and when they are brown on one side, turn them over, and pour over them a custard made of four eggs beaten, a cupful of cream or new milk, and a little cinnamon. Fry to a light brown. Turn carefully, and serve with sifted sugar. Time to fry, ten minutes. Sufficient for three persons. Probable cost, 1s., if made with milk.
A skillet dessert somewhere between a Dutch baby and a French clafoutis, cooked entirely on the stovetop. The hinge is heat: four eggs to a single cup of milk is a very rich custard, and it will scramble rather than set if the pan is hot enough to keep browning the apples.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, straight from the dairy and unskimmed. Ordinary whole milk is the substitute; the cream version gives a noticeably richer, more custardy set.
- A cupfulCassell's cup measures are not standardised; read it as somewhere between 8 fl oz / 240 ml and a half-pint. Either way the ratio of four eggs to one cup makes an unusually egg-heavy custard.
- Pan and quantityFour apples plus a four-egg custard needs a 10-inch heavy skillet, well buttered up the sides. In anything smaller the custard sits too deep to cook through before the underside colours.
- Heat managementBrown the apples over medium-high, then drop to medium-low the moment the custard goes in. The recipe says nothing about covering, but covering for the first few minutes helps steam set the top surface and makes the turn easier.
- Turning itThe instruction to "turn carefully" is doing a lot of work. Slide the set pancake onto a plate, invert a second plate over it, flip, and return it to the pan; attempting it with a spatula usually breaks it. Serving it uninverted, top-side up, loses nothing.
- Ten minutesTen minutes total is optimistic for this depth of custard. Expect twelve to fifteen, and judge by the centre being just firm rather than by the clock.
- ApplesChoose a variety that holds its shape when fried — Braeburn, Boskoop, Granny Smith. Softer eating apples collapse into sauce under the custard.
- Sifted sugarSugar sieved over the finished pancake; in books of this date that could be either a powdered sugar or a fine caster. Icing sugar or caster with a little extra cinnamon both suit.
- YieldThree as written, and generously so — closer to four modern dessert portions. Serve straight from the pan while it is still puffed.
Cassell's places this among the apple entries of its alphabetical sweep, and it belongs to a large Victorian family of stovetop batter-and-fruit dishes cooked in a frying pan. The pattern is close to that of the German Apfelpfannkuchen and, allowing for the fact that a clafoutis is oven-baked, the French clafoutis aux pommes: fruit softened in fat, then flooded with an egg custard that sets around it. What marks the recipe as of its period is the costing — "probable cost, 1s., if made with milk" — a feature Cassell's attached to most of its entries so that a cook or a mistress of the house could budget a meal before committing to it. The distinction drawn between cream and "new milk" is a price distinction as much as a culinary one; new milk meant milk as it came from the cow, unskimmed.