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Apricot Toast
Take part of a tin of preserved tomatoes, turn the juice into a saucepan with a little sugar and half a glass of sherry. Boil it up, put in six apricots, and simmer a few minutes. Cut some rounds from a milk roll, a little larger than the apricots, fry in butter to a golden brown, drain, arrange in a circle, and place on each a piece of apricot, concave side uppermost; put a kernel in the centre of each, pour the syrup over, and serve with whipped cream in the centre of the dish. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A late-Victorian sweet entremets built on fried bread, of the same family as the savoury toasts that fill this part of Cassell's. Two things in the text need flagging: an obvious printer's slip, and a garnish that is no longer considered edible.
- The kernel is the problemApricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is chewed or digested. A handful is enough to cause real poisoning in an adult, and far less in a child. Victorian cooks used them freely as a bitter-almond flavouring and garnish; food authorities in the UK, EU and US now advise against eating them at all. Use a current recipe for a fried apricot toast rather than adapting this one.
- "Preserved tomatoes" is a misprint"Preserved tomatoes" is almost certainly wrong -- The dish is apricot toast, the fruit added is apricots, and the syrup is sweetened and sherried, so the intended ingredient was very likely a tin of preserved apricots and the tomato line a printer's slip. Taken literally it gives a sweet tomato sauce over fried bread.
- Half a glass of sherryIf a wine glass of the period is meant, that held roughly 2 to 2.5 fl oz, so half a glass is about 1 fl oz, or two tablespoons. Boiling it up as directed will drive off some of the alcohol and leave the fortified-wine flavour.
- A milk rollA soft, close-crumbed white roll enriched with milk rather than water, sold by British bakers into the twentieth century. The closest equivalent now is a brioche-style or Vienna roll; the point is a crumb tight enough to fry into a firm crouton without collapsing.
- Simmer a few minutesTinned apricots are already fully cooked, so the simmering is only to warm them and take up the syrup; over-long cooking risks the halves softening too much to sit on the croutons.
- Probable cost, 1s. 6d.One shilling and sixpence for the dish. For a late-Victorian household that was a considerable sum for a sweet course, which suggests tinned fruit and sherry were still treated as small luxuries.
- YieldSix pieces of apricot, each on a fried round, arranged in a ring with the cream in the middle; on that reckoning it would serve about six at the end of a meal, not a dessert in the modern portion sense.
Fried-bread "toasts" run right through Cassell's as a way of turning a spoonful of something rich into a served course, and most of them are savoury: anchovy, marrow, cheese, game. The sweet versions borrowed the same architecture, a crisp buttered crouton to carry fruit that would otherwise be shapeless, and belong to the entremets that closed a Victorian dinner. What dates this particular recipe is the tin. Commercially canned fruit became widely available in British grocers over the second half of the nineteenth century, and cookery writers of the period were still working out how to dress it up for the table rather than treat it as an economy. The kernel garnish reflects an older habit: apricot and peach stones were cracked for their bitter-almond flavour, and recipes of the period call for them as casually as they call for a bay leaf.