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Apple and Custard
Pare and core a large apple, fill the cavity with sugar. Put a little water in the bottom of a dish and bake. Make a custard of a cup of milk, a heaping teaspoon of sugar, a small teaspoon of cornstarch, yolk of one egg. Flavor to taste after boiling thick and pour around the baked apple. Use the white for a meringue; eat cold.
A single-serving sickroom dish that comes together from a baked apple and a small stovetop cornstarch custard. Two details in the original need attention: how far to bake the apple, and what to do with the leftover white.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F in a covered or shallow dish with about a quarter inch of water, 40 to 50 minutes, until a skewer meets no resistance at the core but the apple still holds its shape.
- Choice of appleUse a variety that keeps its structure — Rome, Braeburn, Northern Spy. Softer varieties such as McIntosh tend to break down toward sauce over a bake this long, and some modern dessert apples bred for crisp eating do the same.
- The custard is a cornstarch custardBecause of the starch, this one must come to a full boil, unlike a plain egg custard. Whisk the cornstarch and sugar into the cold milk first, bring it to a boil while stirring, then temper in the yolk and cook a minute more so the starch loses its raw taste and the yolk sets its thickening.
- Flavoring "to taste"Add it off the heat, as the recipe directs, so it does not cook off — half a teaspoon of vanilla, a scrape of nutmeg, or a strip of lemon peel steeped in the milk beforehand and removed.
- The meringueThe instruction is bare. Beat the white with a tablespoon or two of sugar to stiff peaks, spoon it over, and set it in a 350F oven for 12 to 15 minutes until dry and lightly colored. An unbaked meringue on a dish meant for an invalid leaves raw egg white on the plate.
- ServingOne apple, one cup of milk, one yolk: this is a single portion. Multiply straight across for more, but bake the apples in one dish so they share the steam.
- Texture on coolingEaten cold, as directed, the cornstarch custard sets firmer than it looks in the pan. Pour it around the apple while still warm and pourable, then chill.
"Invalid cookery" was a standard department of American household manuals through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when convalescence from typhoid, pneumonia or childbirth meant weeks of bland, spoon-fed food and the sickroom tray was the housekeeper's responsibility rather than a hospital's. The logic of the chapter was digestibility: milk, eggs, arrowroot, cornstarch, beef tea, gruels, and cooked fruit, all soft, all lightly sweetened, all served in small single portions. A baked apple with custard sits squarely in that tradition — the apple's fiber softened by long baking, the custard thickened with starch so it would hold without a second egg. The practice of using the yolk for the custard and the white for a meringue reflects the same economy that ran through the rest of these books, where a single egg was expected to do two jobs.