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FRUIT DESSERTS Apple Rose Cream
Quarter and core apples which have red skins, and stew them without paring in a very little water. Let them cook down quite dry, then rub through a colander. If the apples are of the right kind, the pulp will be colored red by the skins. To a pint of the pulp add about one-fourth cup sugar, or more if necessary to make it sweet enough, a few grains salt, and one-fourth teaspoon rose flavoring. Beat the white of one egg very stiff, then beat the apple pulp, a little at a time, into the beaten white, and beat till the mixture is light and stiff enough to hold its shape. Serve with apple jelly or with custard sauce, or with chopped nuts sprinkled over it.
A cooked-apple foam that gets both its colour and its flavour from ingredients the recipe never lets you taste separately: red apple skins for the pink, rose for the perfume. The one thing standing between it and a modern table is the uncooked egg white.
- Why the cautionThe beaten white is folded into apple pulp that has been taken off the heat and passed through a colander, so the egg is never brought anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Nothing in the mixture — no acid strong enough, no sugar syrup hot enough — makes the raw white safe. For an uncooked apple foam, use a current recipe written with that hazard in mind.
- The apples do the colouringThe pink comes entirely from anthocyanins in the peel, so the variety matters more than anything else here. Deeply red-skinned, thin-skinned cooking apples give the effect; a green or striped apple, or a thick-skinned modern supermarket variety, will give you beige pulp no matter how long it cooks.
- "Cook down quite dry"This is the hinge of the texture. Any free liquid left in the pulp will weep out of the foam within minutes. The apples want to be stewed with only a spoonful or two of water, lid off toward the end, until the mass mounds on the spoon.
- Colander means sievePeriod colanders were often more finely perforated than the modern article, and the recipe clearly expects one that will hold back skins. Modern colander holes are too large; the equivalent tool is a food mill or a medium mesh strainer, which will hold back the skins and seed fragments while letting the coloured pulp through.
- Rose flavoringA quarter teaspoon to a pint of pulp indicates a concentrated rose extract rather than rose water. Rose water of the sort sold today is much weaker and was normally used by the teaspoon or tablespoon; the two are not interchangeable measure for measure, and rose extract turns soapy very quickly if overdone.
- QuantitiesA pint of finished pulp takes roughly 2 lb of apples, and the sugar — a quarter cup, adjusted by taste — is deliberately low. As written the mixture would serve about four.