Home › Cookery › A Nice Dessert of Apples
A Nice Dessert of Apples
Pare and weigh two pounds green apples. Cut them in small pieces, and drop them in a rich syrup, made of a pound and a quarter of "A" sugar and a little water. As soon as the syrup begins to boil, add the juice and grated rind of one large lemon or two small ones.
Boil till the apples become a solid mass. Turn out in a wet mould to stand till cold. Serve on a dish surrounded with boiled custard, or eat with seasoned cream.--Mrs. A. F.
This is an apple paste of the marmalade-and-mould family: a high-sugar cook-down that sets firm enough to unmould and slice. The only difficult part is judging when to stop.
- "A" sugarA nineteenth-century trade grade of refined white sugar, sold under letter grades rather than by texture as now. Use plain granulated sugar, 1 1/4 lb, about 2 3/4 cups.
- Green applesThis means hard, tart, underripe cooking apples, not a green-skinned variety. Granny Smith, Bramley or any firm tart apple works; the acid and the natural pectin are what let the mass set.
- "A little water"Genuinely vague. A quarter cup is enough to dissolve the sugar without scorching before the apples release their own juice; the water all has to boil off again anyway.
- The hinge: cooking to a solid massThis is the whole recipe. The mixture must reduce until a spoon drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track that does not fill in; the original gives no time, and it will take a good while. Stir constantly toward the end, because at that sugar concentration the paste catches and burns quickly and the pan will spit.
- Wet mouldRinsing the mould with cold water and leaving it wet is what allows the set paste to release. A metal bowl, loaf pan or fluted mould all serve; the paste needs several hours cold, and overnight is better.
- Boiled custardNot a baked custard but a stirred pouring sauce, the period name for what is now called creme anglaise: egg yolks, sugar and milk cooked over water until it coats a spoon. "Seasoned cream" means cream sweetened and flavoured; the recipe does not say with what.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield or number of servings. It is intensely sweet and is meant to be eaten in thin slices with the sauce.
Recipes like this sit on the line between dessert and preserve. Before gelatine was a reliable pantry item, a cook who wanted something that would turn out of a mould relied on the fruit's own pectin, driven hard with sugar until it set on cooling — the same principle behind quince paste and apple cheese. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, which is why so many entries end in a set of initials rather than a byline; "Mrs. A. F." was one of hundreds of such contributors. The direction to serve the turned-out mould ringed with boiled custard reflects a period table aesthetic in which a dessert was expected to stand up and be looked at, and the sauce was the setting rather than the dish.