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Pippins, Normandy, Dried
Soak the pippins for three or four hours or longer. Put them into a pie-dish, and fill up the dish with the water in which they were soaked; add the thin rind of a lemon and two ounces of loaf sugar. Place in a gentle oven, and bake for about an hour and a half; then add another two ounces of sugar, and bake again very gently till the apples are tender. Strain the syrup, put with it the juice of the lemon, a few drops of cochineal, and a glass of port wine. Place the apples on a glass dish, pour the syrup when cool over them, and serve cold, with a spoonful of Devonshire cream on each apple. (See also NORMANDY PIPPINS.)
A Victorian compote of dried whole apples, stewed slowly in their own soaking liquor and finished with port and clotted cream. The recipe assumes you know what Normandy pippins are and how many you want, so a little filling-in is needed.
- What a Normandy pippin isA whole apple, peeled or unpeeled, dried until leathery and sold loose by grocers. The nearest modern equivalent is whole dried apples from a health-food shop or Middle Eastern grocer; dried apple rings will work but collapse faster and need far less baking.
- No quantity is givenThe dish is sized by the pie-dish. The 4 oz of sugar in total would suit something on the order of 1 lb (450 g) of dried pippins, but the fruit swells a good deal as it soaks and bakes, so allow a roomy dish; how many it serves depends on the size of the apples.
- Soak longer than toldThree or four hours is the minimum for modern commercially dried fruit. Overnight in cold water gives a plumper apple and a better-flavoured cooking liquor, and the soaking water is the body of the syrup, so do not throw it away.
- A gentle ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a gentle oven is usually taken as somewhere around 300F (150C), lower if your oven runs hot. The point is that the apples swell without bursting; anything brisker risks splitting the skins.
- Sugar in two stagesThe staged addition keeps the syrup weak while the apples are still firm: sugar in concentration slows fruit from softening, so the second 2 oz goes in once they are on the way to tender.
- Loaf sugar and cochinealLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated is a direct substitute. The cochineal is purely cosmetic, to redden a dull brown syrup, and can be left out or replaced with a splash of blackcurrant or pomegranate juice.
- The syrupStrained syrup is often thin. Reduce it in a pan to a light coating consistency before adding the lemon juice and the port, so the port is not boiled. A 'glass' in Victorian recipes usually means a wineglassful, about 2 fl oz.
- Devonshire creamClotted cream, sold in tubs in most supermarkets. Thick crme frache is the closest stand-in; whipped cream is too airy against a heavy syrup.
A "pippin" is strictly an apple raised from a pip rather than a graft, but by the nineteenth century the word had settled into the names of particular keeping varieties, and "Normandy pippins" meant something more specific again: whole apples dried hard and sold by British grocers alongside prunes, figs and dried cherries, the name pointing to a French origin. They belonged to the winter store cupboard, when fresh dessert apples had gone soft or run out, and appear all through Victorian cookery books stewed with sugar, lemon and a little wine. The port and cochineal here are doing the same work as the colouring in a Victorian jelly or blancmange, turning a plain brown stewed fruit into something with a claret glow fit for a glass dish on the table. The cross-reference to a second entry under "Normandy Pippins" reflects how such dictionaries were organised: the same dried fruit turns up under more than one heading, treated slightly differently each time.