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Apple Porcupine
Make a syrup by boiling eight minutes one and one-half cups of sugar and one and one-half cups of water. Wipe, pare and core eight apples. Put apples in syrup as soon as pared so they won't discolor. Cook until soft, occasionally skimming the syrup during cooking.
Apples cook better covered with the syrup; therefore it is better to use a deep saucepan and have two cookings. Drain apple from syrup; cool, fill cavities with jelly, marmalade or preserved fruit, and stick the apples with almonds blanched and split in halves lengthwise. Serve with cream sauce. - Mrs Chester Simmons.
A simple poached-apple dessert whose success turns entirely on the apples holding their shape. Everything else is assembly.
- Choose a firm appleUse a variety that holds together when poached — Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Gala or Jonagold. Any apple that collapses into sauce when baked will collapse here too, and a slumped apple cannot be quilled.
- The syrup1½ cups sugar to 1½ cups water boiled eight minutes gives a light syrup, thin enough to poach in rather than candy. Keep it at a bare simmer once the apples go in; a rolling boil tears the peeled flesh.
- Two batches, not one crowded panThe instruction to cook in two lots is the practical heart of the method. Eight apples in one pan will not be covered by this quantity of syrup, and the exposed tops cook unevenly. A deep, narrow saucepan holding four at a time works better than a wide one.
- TimingNo time is given because it depends on size and variety. Expect roughly 15–25 minutes; test with a skewer at the shoulder rather than the base. The recipe says to cook until soft, so stop as soon as they yield, before they slump.
- CoringCore from the stem end without going through the base, so the cavity holds the jelly. An apple corer or a melon baller does this cleanly.
- Blanching almondsWhole raw almonds, covered with boiling water for a minute, then slipped from their skins and split lengthwise while still damp. Dry almonds shatter rather than split. Sliced commercial almonds are too thin to stand upright — the quills are the point.
- Cream sauceIn a book of this period this most likely means a pouring custard (crème anglaise) or simply sweetened thin cream rather than a flour-thickened white sauce, though usage varied. The recipe gives no serving temperature.
- Yield and holdingEight apples, one per person. Poach and fill a few hours ahead and chill, but add the almonds shortly before serving or they soften and lean over.
- Don't waste the syrupBoil the drained syrup down until it thickens slightly and spoon a little over each apple for gloss, or keep it for the next batch of fruit.
Fruit spiked with split blanched almonds is an old conceit in English and American cookery, generally going under the name hedgehog or porcupine — an almond-studded 'hedgehog' of shaped almond paste appears in British cookbooks well before this one, and the trick migrated easily to a whole poached apple, which has roughly the right silhouette. The appeal is that it costs nothing but patience: a poached apple is plain nursery food, and the almonds and a spoonful of jelly turn it into something fit for a dinner table. The attribution to Mrs Chester Simmons reflects a common contributed-recipe convention of the period, crediting the contributor by her husband's name.