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Apple Souffle
3 pints (6 cups) apple sauce 1 tablespoonful rum 3 tablespoonfuls melted butter Sugar to taste tract 3 eggs Whipped and sweetened cream ½ teaspoonful nutmeg ex- 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 cupful macaroon crumbs Peel and core some apples and stew till tender, having three pints of sauce. Rub the apples through a sieve, add the butter, sugar, nutmeg extract, rum, and the yolks of eggs well beaten. When the mixture is cool, add the whites of eggs stiffly beaten.
Butter an earthenware dish, turn the apple mixture into it, sprinkle with the crushed macaroons, and set in the oven to bake for half an hour. Serve hot with the whipped cream sweetened and flavored with the vanilla extract.
A baked apple pudding rather than a true souffle: the beaten whites lighten it but there is far too much fruit purée for it to climb the dish. The garbled lines in the ingredient list are printer's and scanner's damage, and resolve into nutmeg extract and vanilla extract.
- Oven temperatureThe original names none. Bake at 350F for the stated half hour, until the top is set and the macaroon crumbs are browned; the mixture is already cooked apple, so you are only setting the eggs.
- Three pints of sauceSix cups of thick, sieved apple purée takes roughly 4 to 4½ lb of apples, peeled and cored. Stew them with very little water and let the purée cook down — watery sauce will weep in the dish.
- Nutmeg extractThe 1½ teaspoonfuls of "nutmeg extract" was a bottled flavouring of the sort sold alongside vanilla and lemon. It is hard to find on a grocery shelf now; roughly ½ teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg is a reasonable stand-in, adjusted by taste.
- Macaroon crumbsThese are almond macaroons of the amaretti type, dried and crushed — not the coconut macaroons the word now suggests. Crumbled amaretti or dry almond biscotti are the closest thing on a shelf today.
- Cool the purée firstThe hinge of the recipe. Fold the beaten whites into a mixture that is still warm and they collapse at once; let it come to room temperature, then fold in thirds with a light hand.
- The dishThe original says only 'earthenware dish', buttered. Six cups of purée plus the beaten whites needs a large baking dish, on the order of 3 quarts, filled no closer than an inch to the rim.
- Sugar to tasteDepends entirely on the apples. Sweeten the hot purée before the eggs go in and taste it then — around ½ to ¾ cup for cooking apples, less for dessert varieties.
- YieldServes eight generously, and it is best eaten within a few minutes of leaving the oven, while the crumb topping is still crisp.
Casserole cookery seems to have had a small vogue in English and American kitchens in the years just before the First World War, when glazed earthenware and the newer fireproof wares were often promoted as economical: one vessel went from the oven to the table, saving fuel, washing and a serving dish. The dish itself belongs to a long line of baked apple purées lightened with egg — the English apple snow is a loose cousin, though it is normally uncooked — and the rum, the nutmeg and the crushed almond macaroons are all conventional nineteenth-century apple seasonings, the macaroons doing the work a streusel or buttered crumb would do now. The bottled "nutmeg extract" called for looks like a marker of the period: manufactured flavouring essences appear to have been cheap and fashionable, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s reach for them where an earlier writer would simply have grated the spice.