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Florentine of Oranges and Apples
Take one pound of golden pippins; scoop and pare them; throw them into cold water. Have ready over the fire one pint of water, into which put half a pound of lump sugar; boil and skim; then put in the pippins and stew till clear; do not let them break. When cold, place them in a pie-dish with two table-spoonfuls of orange (Seville) marmalade, and a little lemon-peel. Cover with puff paste. Time, stew till tender. Probable cost, 8d. or 10d.
A covered apple tart of the plainest sort, with the fruit poached whole in syrup before it goes under the pastry. The original assumes you know what to do with the puff paste once it is on, so the oven is the main gap to fill.
- Golden pippinsA small, firm, sharp yellow dessert apple, largely out of commercial cultivation. Any small apple that holds its shape in syrup will do the same work " Any firm variety such as Cox, Braeburn or a russet; avoid a soft cooking apple, which will collapse and defeat the instruction not to let them break.
- Scoop and parePare means peel; scoop means to core them whole with an apple corer, leaving the fruit intact. The cold water is to stop them browning while you finish the rest.
- MeasuresA British pint is 20 fl oz, so the syrup is 2 1/2 cups water to 8 oz sugar ", roughly 1 1/8 cups granulated. Lump sugar was simply refined loaf sugar broken up; ordinary white sugar is the equivalent.
- Stewing the applesKeep the syrup at a bare simmer and turn the apples gently once or twice; a rolling boil is what breaks them. They are done when translucent at the edges, which for whole small apples will take 15 minutes or more depending on size.
- Seville marmaladeBitter orange marmalade, not sweet-orange preserve. The bitterness is doing real work against half a pound of sugar; a sweet marmalade will make the dish cloying.
- OvenNone is given. Puff paste wants a hot oven, 425°F, for about 25–30 minutes, until the lid is risen and deep gold. Cool the apples fully before covering, or the underside of the pastry will steam rather than rise.
- AssemblyThis recipe calls for a lid only: the paste goes over the fruit, with no bottom crust specified. Spoon a little of the poaching syrup in with the fruit, but not so much that the pastry sits in liquid.
- YieldA pound of small apples fills a small pie-dish of about 1 1/2 pints and serves three or four. Serve warm with cream.
"Florentine" in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery books means a dish baked under a pastry lid in a deep dish, savoury as often as sweet; Cassell's uses the word in that older sense rather than for the lacy almond biscuit that now carries the name. The golden pippin was one of the great English dessert apples of the Georgian and Victorian period, prized for its flavour and keeping, and it appears constantly in preserving and tart recipes before falling out of orchards in the twentieth century. The pairing with Seville marmalade is characteristic of the period's larder: bitter oranges arrived from Spain in a short midwinter season, were boiled into marmalade in January, and the jar then flavoured puddings and tarts for the rest of the year. The costing in pence, of a kind generally associated with Cassell's, was aimed at a household cook working to a weekly budget.