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Apple Mange
Reduce to a pulp a dozen fine apples, or other fruit, and sweeten and flavor according to taste. When quite cold, pour it into a glass dish, and cover it with whipped cream, which will be much firmer if made the day before it is wanted. Time to simmer the apples, forty minutes.
A cold fruit fool in all but name: sweetened apple pulp under a blanket of whipped cream. The only real technique is getting the apples dry enough that they hold a shape in the dish.
- The hinge: cook the apples down, don't stew them wetForty minutes of simmering is meant to evaporate liquid, not just soften the fruit. Use a couple of tablespoons of water at most, keep the pan uncovered for the last stretch, and stop when the pulp mounds on a spoon. A watery pulp will bleed under the cream within an hour.
- QuantitiesA dozen "fine" apples is roughly 3 to 4 1/2 lb depending on size, giving something like 4 to 5 cups of pulp and serving six to eight. Sweetening depends entirely on the fruit: start at 1/2 cup sugar per 3 lb of a tart apple such as Bramley or Granny Smith and taste while it is still hot.
- Reduce to a pulpRecipes of the period commonly direct that cooked fruit be pressed through a hair sieve to remove skin and core fibre. Cooking peeled, cored quarters and then mashing or briefly blending achieves the same thing; avoid over-blending, which makes the pulp gluey.
- FlavouringThe recipe leaves this open. Flavourings common in the period include lemon zest and juice, a stick of cinnamon or a clove removed before serving, or a spoonful of rose water or brandy. Add citrus juice off the heat so it keeps its brightness.
- Whipped cream made the day beforeThe advice most likely reflects unhomogenized cream, which firmed as it stood cold. Modern heavy or double cream whipped a day ahead may weep or slacken. Whipping it the same day to soft peaks is safer; if it must be held, a teaspoon of sifted icing sugar or a little mascarpone folded in will help stabilise it.
- Quite cold means quite coldChill the pulp thoroughly, ideally several hours, before the cream goes on. Warm fruit melts the cream immediately and the dish separates into two layers of liquid.
- Other fruitThe recipe invites substitution, and it works with quince, plums, gooseberries or damsons. Very juicy fruit needs longer reduction than forty minutes to reach the same thickness.
- Nothing is bakedWhatever chapter it sits in, this is a stovetop-and-refrigerator dish. No oven is required at any stage.
The odd title is probably a shortening of blanc-mange, the pale moulded cream of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English dessert cookery; here the fruit takes the place of the almond milk and gelatine, and nothing is moulded at all. Dishes of this shape appear across Victorian and Edwardian household books under a shifting set of names -- apple snow, apple fool, apple cream -- all of them built on the same logic: sieved sweetened fruit pulp lightened or covered with dairy. The instruction to make the whipped cream a day in advance is a small window onto the period dairy, where cream was neither pasteurised nor homogenized and behaved differently under a whisk than the cartons on sale now.