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Apples and Prunes or Raisins
These also are combinations affording much nourishment and variety and may be made with either dried or fresh apples. If dried wash, core, and soak over night and wash the raisins or prunes, working the latter well with the hands. Let them stand in the last water over night and simmer in it in the morning. (The water in which the fruit was soaked should be sufficient to cook it all in the morning.) Simmer the raisins or prunes very slowly for an hour then add the soaked apples and simmer together till done. No sugar should be needed, which is an additional reason for the healthfulness of the dish. BAKED APPLES (With nuts or honey) Peel the apples and core well, then place in deep pan, allowing a heaping tablespoon of sugar and half a cup of water to each apple. In the centre of each apple place a teaspoon of chopped nuts and strip of lemon or orange peel and over the whole sprinkle cinnamon and nutmeg. Bake very slowly and the juice will become jelly-like. Serve hot or cold.
Or, fill centres with honey and a little butter, preparing otherwise the same.
APPLE SOUP No. I For three pints of soup take a pint of apple stewed soft, rubbed through colander and sweetened, and to it add one and one-half tablespoons sago or tapioca cooked till soft and clear in a pint of boiling water. Simmer together twenty minutes, flavouring with salt and cinnamon; strain and serve hot or chilled.
APPLE SOUP No. 2 To two quarts of water allow seven tart apples cored but unpeeled, sliced thin. Cook them with one-half cup rice till soft then rub through sieve, add spice, a little sugar, and chopped or candied fruit. (See also Fruit Soups in Introductory Recipes.) APPLE OMELET No. I Make Plain Omelet as in Introductory Recipes. When cooked sufficiently to fold over, place on one-half of it a cup of apple sauce or fine-chopped apple; fold over and serve.
APPLE OMELET No. 2 Stew, then mash, eight large apples and put through colander. Add one cup sugar and one tablespoon butter. Let cool; whip in four eggs beaten separately; place in baking- or soufflé-dish in rather quick oven and bake till brown.
A cluster of apple preparations from a period when dried fruit was the winter default and sugar was used sparingly on principle. The instructions assume you know your stove; here are the numbers they leave out.
- The hinge: keep the soaking waterThe stewed apple-and-prune dish depends entirely on cooking the fruit in the water it soaked in, which is by then a thin fruit syrup. Pour it off and you lose both the sweetness and the reason no sugar is needed.
- Dried apples, by weightThe recipe gives no quantities. Dried apple slices swell severalfold once soaked and cooked; for four servings, something like 4 oz dried apples and 4 oz prunes or raisins, covered by an inch of water overnight, is a reasonable starting point.
- "Working the latter well with the hands"The recipe's own wording makes the kneading a washing step, dried fruit of the period often reaching the kitchen gritty. Modern packaged dried fruit needs a rinse at most.
- Prunes for an hourAn hour of slow simmering suits the hard, heavily dried prunes of the period. Today's semi-soft pitted prunes collapse in 20-25 minutes, so add the apples after about 15 minutes and cook until both are tender.
- "Bake very slowly"For the baked apples, 300-325F, an hour to an hour and a quarter for large apples. The low heat is what reduces the sugar and water to the jelly-like syrup promised; at 400F it will scorch at the pan edges before the fruit softens.
- Sago and tapiocaSago (palm starch) is hard to find; small pearl tapioca behaves the same way. Cook it in the pint of boiling water until the pearls are clear through with no white centre, then combine with the apple purée.
- Apple Soup No. 2Two quarts of water to seven apples and half a cup of rice gives a very thin purée; expect to reduce it, or start with a quart and a half. Leaving the peels on and sieving afterwards is deliberate, as the skins carry both colour and pectin.
- "Rather quick oven" for Apple Omelet No. 2400-425F. This is a sweet soufflé, not an omelet: the whites go in last and it should be baked in a buttered dish about 25-30 minutes, until browned and just set with a slight tremble at the centre. It will sink as it cools, which is normal.
- YieldsApple Soup No. 1 makes three pints, four to six servings. Apple Omelet No. 2, from eight apples and four eggs, serves six.
These recipes belong to a strain of health-minded cookery in which writers pressed the case that fruit sugars made added sugar unnecessary and that dried fruit could carry a household through winter. The remark that "no sugar should be needed, which is an additional reason for the healthfulness of the dish" is the tell: this is dietary argument as much as instruction. Apple soup itself is older and associated chiefly with Central and Northern Europe, thickened with rice, sago or tapioca and served hot or chilled; sweet soups have never been common in Britain or America. The apple omelet, meanwhile, occupied a blurred category in period cookbooks, where "omelet" could mean anything from a folded egg to the baked, egg-risen sweet pudding of the second version here, closer to what we would now call a souffle.