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Puff Paste (Few preserved Cherries)
A few preserved Cherries.
Peel, core, and slice the apples; place them in a stewpan with the butter, sugar, and lemon-rind, and let them stew slowly until tender. Then rub them through a hair-sieve. Line the edges of a pie-dish with puff-paste, and decorate it tastefully. Add the yolks of the eggs to the apple, and pour the mixture into the pie-dish. Place it in a moderate oven for about twenty minutes. Whip the whites very stiff; spread them over the apple, dredge over a little castor sugar; garnish with the cherries. Then place the pudding in a cool oven to set the white of eggs; it will take about ten minutes, and should get a light brown.
An apple snow pudding with a puff-paste rim and a meringue top, of the kind usually found under names like Apple Meringue or Queen of Apples. The written method survives intact; the quantities do not, so treat the following as guidance for scaling it yourself.
- QuantitiesThe ingredient list has not come down with the method — only the cherries are named with an amount, and that amount is "a few". For a standard 8–9 inch pie-dish, work from about 2 lb apples, 2 oz butter, 3–4 oz sugar, the pared rind of one lemon and 3 eggs, and adjust the sugar to the fruit.
- Oven temperaturesA "moderate oven" is usually taken as roughly 350F/180C for the first twenty minutes. The "cool oven" that sets the meringue is somewhere in the region of 250-300F/120-150C; period usage varies. Hotter than that and the peaks are likely to colour before the inside has set, and the meringue may weep.
- Puff paste at the edge onlyThis is a rim of pastry laid on the wetted lip of the dish, not a lined shell. Cut a strip roughly an inch wide, press it down, knock up the edge and flute or leaf-cut it — the "decorate tastefully" of the original.
- Hair sieveA fine-meshed sieve of woven horsehair. A nylon drum sieve or a fine mesh strainer does the same job; a food processor will not, as it aerates the pulp and leaves it slack.
- Drive off the moistureThe original says only to stew until tender and sieve, but a slack puree will give trouble: the better the apple holds a spoon-mark before the yolks go in, the less the meringue will slide and the less the pastry rim will steam.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar. Dredged over raw meringue it dissolves into the surface and gives the light crust and pale brown colour the recipe asks for; granulated sits in gritty beads.
- Preserved cherriesCandied or syrup-preserved cherries of the period. They go on with the meringue, before the final ten minutes in the cool oven, not after the baking is finished. Modern glace cherries or drained morello cherries in syrup serve the same purpose.
- YieldOn the suggested quantities, six to eight, warm or at room temperature. It does not keep -- the meringue softens overnight.
Apple purée under a meringue lid is one of the standard economical sweets of the late Victorian and Edwardian pastry section: it uses the yolks to enrich the fruit and the whites to cover it, so nothing is wasted, and a single narrow band of puff paste round the rim gives the dish the appearance of a made pastry at a fraction of the butter and labour. Books of "high class" cookery — the phrase signalled instruction aimed at the trained cook or the ambitious lady's kitchen rather than the plain household — were fond of it because the finishing offered scope to show off: fluted paste, a smoothed or piped meringue, and a scatter of preserved cherries for colour. The two-stage bake, hot then cool, reflects a coal range where a dish was simply moved to a lower shelf or a cooling oven once the main cooking was done.