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Baked Apple Roll
Make a paste, roll out thin. Spread over it apples cut in thin slices. Sprinkle nice sugar, and put bits of butter all over this. Roll it up, place it in a baking-pan. Pour in water and put sugar and butter around it, grating over all a nutmeg. Any other kind of fruit can be made into the same kind of roll.--Mrs. S.T.
APPLE MERINGUE, with custard. 1 quart apple-sauce. Juice of a lemon. Whites of 4 eggs. 1 large cup of sugar. Strain apple-sauce through a colander. Put it in the dish in which it is to be served. Beat the whites to a stiff froth, adding a little sugar. Cover the apples with the frosting. Set in the oven to brown, and eat with whipped cream or soft custard.--Mrs. G. W. P.
Apple Meringue.
Stew the apples until well done and smooth. Sweeten to the taste; add the rind of a grated lemon. Beat the whites of five eggs to a stiff froth; add to them a teacup powdered sugar, a little rose water, juice of a lemon, or any seasoning preferred. Put the fruit in a flat dish, and put the egg on with a spoon. Brown a few minutes. Add a little butter to the apples while hot.--Mrs. C. Mc G.
Three related apple desserts run together on one page, all written for cooks who already knew the proportions. The roll is a baked version of an English roly-poly; the two meringues are the same dish twice, in different hands.
- "A paste" means pastryIn nineteenth-century cookery books paste is generally a short pie or biscuit dough rather than a pudding batter. As a starting point, a short crust made with about 2 cups flour, 2/3 cup fat and enough ice water to bind, rolled to a rectangle roughly 10 by 14 inches and a scant 1/4 inch thick, is about the right scale for 4 to 6 servings.
- The water in the pan is the pointSugar, butter and about a cup of water poured around the roll cook down into a syrup that bastes the pastry and keeps the bottom from drying. Use a dish only slightly larger than the roll so the liquid does not spread thin and scorch.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A roll of this kind wants 375F for 45 to 55 minutes, until the pastry is browned and the apple slices are tender when a skewer goes through the centre.
- Slice the apples thin and seal the endsThe apples cook only as long as the pastry, so slices thicker than about 1/8 inch will still be firm. Pinch the long seam and tuck the ends under, seam down, or the syrup inside runs out into the pan.
- Nutmeg"grating over all a nutmeg" reads as the whole seed, which is a great deal by modern taste. Half a nutmeg, roughly 1 to 1.5 teaspoons grated, is a safer amount if you want the spice in the background.
- Apple-sauce for the meringueA quart of stewed apple, strained, is about 4 cups from roughly 3 lb of apples. It should be thick enough to hold a spoon mark, or the meringue slides and weeps.
- Browning the meringueFour to five whites with a cup of sugar give a soft meringue. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all round and brown at 400F for 5 to 8 minutes, watching it; the centre stays soft-set rather than cooked through, which is worth knowing if you are serving it to anyone who avoids lightly cooked egg.
- Rose waterThe second version's rose water is still sold and is potent. A quarter teaspoon in a cup of sugar is plenty; more turns the dish soapy.
- YieldThe roll serves 4 to 6. Either meringue, made on a quart of apple, serves 6 to 8. The first version directs that it be eaten with whipped cream or soft custard; the second leaves the serving open.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and usually dated 1878 (copyright 1877), gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why the page ends in initials rather than a single author's voice and why the same dish appears twice in successive versions. The baked apple roll belongs to the English family of roly-poly puddings; the difference here is that it is baked in a syrup rather than boiled in a cloth. Apple meringue, sometimes also called apple snow or apple float, was a standard way to stretch a bowl of leftover sauce into a company dessert, and the closing instruction to eat it with soft custard shows the period habit of pairing a stiff-beaten white with a pouring sauce made from the yolks left over.