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Apple Purée
1 lb. apples 1 teaspoonful butter 1 teaspoonful grated lemon rind I bay leaf 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 1 tablespoonful orange flower ozs.) sugar water 2 egg whites Peel, core, and slice the apples; put them into a casserole, with the butter, sugar, lemon rind, bay leaf, and orange flower water.
Put the cover on the casserole and cook slowly to a pulp; rub through a sieve, and with it about three parts fill some small casseroles.
Beat up the eggs, then add two tablespoonfuls of sugar to them.
Decorate the purée with this meringue and serve hot.
The stewed purée itself is straightforward period cookery, but the topping is uncooked egg white spooned onto hot fruit and taken to the sickbed, which is where this recipe fails. Notes below cover the reading of the text as well as the hazard.
- Why the cautionThe meringue is beaten raw egg white with sugar stirred in, laid on warm puree and served immediately. Nothing brings it to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella; a hot fruit pulp underneath a cold foam does not cook it through. The dish appears to belong to the book's invalid or sickroom cookery, in which case it was aimed at exactly the readers - the sick, the elderly, the convalescent - for whom raw egg is least advisable. For a dish of this kind, use a current recipe.
- "Casserole" means the potHere a casserole is a lidded fireproof vessel - earthenware or the newer fireproof glass - rather than the modern sense of a baked dish. The recipe does not say whether it sits on the stovetop or in the oven, only that it is covered and cooked slowly. The "small casseroles" for serving are individual ramekin-sized pots of the same ware.
- The garbled quantitiesThe ingredient column has run together in the original setting. It reads as 1 lb apples, 1 teaspoon butter, 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind, 1 bay leaf, 2 heaping tablespoons (2 oz) sugar, 1 tablespoon orange flower water, and 2 egg whites, with a further 2 tablespoons sugar for the meringue. One pound of apples is about three medium fruit.
- Orange flower waterA distillate of bitter orange blossom, still sold for Middle Eastern and French pastry work. It is far stronger than it smells cold; a tablespoon to a pound of fruit is assertive by modern taste.
- Bay leaf with applesNot an error. A single bay leaf in stewing fruit is an old European habit that reads as faint spice rather than savoury. It is removed before sieving.
- "Cook slowly to a pulp"Over low heat, covered, with only the moisture the apples give up plus the orange flower water — around 20 to 25 minutes for sliced fruit. Sharp cooking apples collapse; firm dessert varieties will need coaxing.
- Sieving"Rub through a sieve" means a fine mesh worked with a wooden spoon, or a food mill. A blender gives a slacker, glossier purée than the period texture.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many pots it fills; a pound of apples reduced to pulp will three-quarters fill roughly two to three individual dishes.
This appears to come from an early twentieth-century book associated with the wave of enthusiasm for fireproof earthenware and the new fireproof glass that let one pot go from flame to table. Many general cookbooks of the era carried a chapter of invalid cookery, since nursing the sick happened at home and the diet of a convalescent was a defined domestic skill: thin gruels, beef tea, jellies, milk puddings, and sieved fruit purées, all valued for being smooth, mild and easily swallowed. Apple purée seems to belong to that repertoire, and the flourishes here — lemon rind, a bay leaf, orange flower water, a cap of meringue — may well be there to make an invalid's dish look like something worth eating, at a time when presentation was considered part of the treatment. Orange flower water itself is much older than the book, a leftover from the heavily perfumed sweets of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European kitchens, by 1900 surviving mainly in pastry and in cookery for the sick.