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Stewed Apples
Apples are very nice pared, cored, sliced, and gently stewed with a little white wine, sugar, and flavoring. They are quickly prepared, served with custard are a pleasant substitute for apple pie, and are an agreeable addition to the tea-table. They may be mixed with plums or other fruit. Time to stew, a quarter of an hour.
A loose sketch rather than a formula, typical of turn-of-the-century fruit entries. The instructions are all in the first clause: pare, core, slice, stew gently.
- ProportionsNothing is quantified. For 2 lb of apples, start with about 1/2 cup white wine, 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar, and adjust once the fruit begins to break down. Tart apples want the full sugar; sweet dessert apples want less.
- "Gently stewed" is the hingeA bare simmer with the lid on, stirring rarely. A hard boil turns sliced apples to sauce in five minutes, which is a different dish.
- A quarter of an hourFifteen minutes suits a firm cooking apple cut in thick slices. Softer varieties such as McIntosh will collapse well before that; check at eight minutes and pull them while the slices still hold shape.
- FlavoringThe recipe leaves this open. Lemon peel, a cinnamon stick, a few cloves or a scrape of nutmeg would all suit. Add whole spices at the start and remove them before serving.
- The wineAny dry or off-dry white works. It reduces very little in fifteen minutes under a lid, so the finished syrup keeps a noticeable wine character; a splash of water in place of some of it tames that.
- Served with custardMost likely a pouring custard rather than a set baked one, though the recipe does not say. Cold custard over warm apples is one common way to serve it.
- Mixing with other fruitPlums, quince, or pears all stew at different rates. Add quick-cooking fruit such as plums in the last five minutes so the pieces stay distinct.
- Yield2 lb of apples gives about four servings as a dessert, or six alongside cake at the tea-table.
Stewed fruit sat at the plain end of the Victorian and Edwardian dessert range: cheap, fast, and requiring no oven at a time when firing the range for a single pie was a real consideration. The comparison drawn here to apple pie is made by the recipe itself, and the mention of the tea-table places it in the late-afternoon spread of bread and butter, cake, and preserved fruit kept up by many middle-class households. White wine rather than water suggests a slightly better table, and some compilations of this sort gave more than one version so a cook could suit the occasion. Apples were an obvious base because a well-kept cellar could carry firm cooking varieties from autumn through to spring, long after softer fruit had gone.