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Meringued Apples
Prepare as for baking. When cold fill centres with marmalade, or marshmallows, then cover with meringue made in proportion of four eggs to one pound of sugar. Flavour with rose water or lemon extract and place in quick oven to lightly brown.
A short entry that assumes you already know how to bake an apple. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperatures, the meringue ratio, and what "marshmallows" meant when this was written.
- "Prepare as for baking"Core the apples without cutting through the base, score or pare a ring of skin around the middle so they do not burst, and bake at 350F until a skewer meets no resistance, roughly 35-45 minutes depending on size. Firm baking varieties — Rome, Braeburn, Bramley if you want collapse — hold their shape best.
- Four eggs to one pound of sugarTaken as whites only, which is what "meringue" implies, that works out to about 4 oz (115 g) of sugar per white, roughly twice the usual modern ratio for a soft meringue. Expect a very sweet, dense topping that browns fast and weeps easily; modern recipes generally call for about 2 oz per white.
- "Quick oven"Generally understood as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat the meringue colours in a few minutes, which is what the recipe intends: a light browning, not a drying-out. Watch it continuously, as the sugar-heavy mixture scorches before it sets through.
- Marshmallows of 1900Marshmallows -- at this period they were softer and more soluble than the modern extruded kind, made with gelatin or gum arabic. Modern marshmallows tend to melt and spread in a hot oven rather than staying creamy, so marmalade is the easier of the two fillings to control.
- Rose waterStill sold, usually in Middle Eastern or Indian groceries. Use it sparingly, about 1/2 teaspoon for four whites, as strengths vary a great deal between brands and too much quickly turns soapy.
- Beating and applyingWhip the whites to soft peaks before adding sugar a spoonful at a time, then beat to stiff, glossy peaks. Seal the meringue down onto the apple and the dish surface; a free edge shrinks and slides off as it bakes.
- CoolingThe apples must be genuinely cold before filling, as the recipe says. Residual heat starts to melt the meringue from below and the whole thing slumps.
- YieldOne apple per person; four whites will cover six to eight apples generously.
Meringue-topped baked apples belong to a large family of late-Victorian and Edwardian dishes built on the idea that fruit plus beaten white plus a hot oven makes something elegant out of almost nothing — the same logic as apple snow, queen of puddings and the meringued rice moulds that fill books of this period. The whole-apple version depends on the American and English habit of baking apples in their skins, which keeps the fruit intact enough to serve as its own dish. The marshmallow filling is of a piece with other cookery of the period: commercial marshmallow confections became widely available in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s used them freely as a sweet, meltable stuffing in baked fruit and on top of sweet potatoes, though a four-line recipe of unknown date will not bear much weight as evidence of when this one was written. Rose water as a flavouring, by contrast, points backwards — it was the standard perfume of English sweet cookery for centuries before vanilla and lemon extract largely displaced it, and here the two eras sit side by side in a single line.