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Apricots (tinned) with Cream
Place the fruit in a glass dish with the concave side uppermost; pour the syrup round the fruit, and with a tea-spoon remove any syrup that may have settled in the little cups or concavities. Get a small jar of Devonshire clotted cream; take about half a tea-spoonful and place it in the middle of each cup, and put a single preserved cherry on the top of the cream. This dish can be improved in appearance by chopping up a little green angelica like parsley, and sprinkling a few of the little green specks on the cream. Probable cost, 2s.
An assembly rather than a cooked dish, so everything depends on the components and on keeping the halves dry enough to hold the cream.
- The hinge: drain the cupsSyrup pooled in the hollow will thin the cream and slump it off the fruit within minutes. Blot each cavity with a corner of kitchen paper after spooning out the syrup, and assemble no more than half an hour before serving.
- Tinned apricotsBuy halves in syrup rather than juice — the recipe wants the heavier syrup to pour round the fruit as a sauce. A 400 g tin gives roughly eight to ten halves, enough for four small servings.
- Devonshire clotted creamStill sold in small tubs and unchanged in character: scalded, thick, about 55–60 per cent fat. It should be cold and firm enough to hold a domed half-teaspoon. Crème fraîche or whipped double cream will substitute but will spread more.
- Preserved cherryMost likely a candied or glacé cherry rather than a modern maraschino from a jar of bright syrup. Blot it dry or the colour will bleed into the white cream.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, once a fixture of the cake decorator's shelf, is now a specialist buy from baking suppliers. Chop it very finely, as directed, so it reads as green flecks and not as chewy batons; finely chopped pistachio is one modern stand-in.
- "Probable cost, 2s."Cassell's costed most of its entries for the household book-keeper. Two shillings was not trivial: tinned fruit and Devonshire clotted cream sent up from the West Country both carried a premium.
- YieldThe original gives none. Reckon two to three apricot halves a head as a light finish to a large meal; a glass dish of ten halves serves four.
This is a Victorian dessert built almost entirely on the new grocery trade rather than the kitchen. Commercial canning of fruit expanded sharply through the second half of the nineteenth century, and tinned apricots and peaches turned an expensive out-of-season fruit into something a middle-class household could set on the table in January. The dish demands no skill: the work is in the arrangement, and the cook is being taught presentation. The clotted cream, angelica and glacé cherry belong to a decorative grammar that ran through late Victorian confectionery, where green and red specks against white were a common finish for trifles and iced cakes. Devonshire cream itself was sent out by rail and post in small jars, a named regional speciality sold well beyond its own county.