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Swedish Apple Torte
Cook apple sauce in usual manner 1 pkg. Holland rusk or bread crumbs 1/2 lb. butter 3 T lard Mrs. Geo. Ives.
Take a good-size skillet, place butter and lard and bread crumbs in it, put on fire and fry this until bread crumbs are evenly soaked with the butter and lard. (Keep stirring, as it burns very easily). Then take a pudding pan (2 qt. size), well greased with butter, put layer of crumbs, layer of apple sauce, until pan is filled. Sprinkle top with sugar, place in oven and bake 30 minutes. Turn out on plate. When cold slice and serve with whipped cream.
A layered crumb-and-applesauce pudding of the type Swedes call äppelkaka. The recipe assumes you already know how to make applesauce and gives no oven temperature, so a few decisions have to be made for it.
- The hinge: fry the crumbs properlyFry until every crumb is evenly soaked with the fat, as the recipe directs. Crumbs left merely warm turn to paste against the wet applesauce and the torte will be harder to slice. The recipe warns that the mixture burns very easily, so keep stirring.
- Holland ruskA twice-baked, very dry round biscuit sold by the package, close kin to Dutch beschuit and still found in some supermarkets and Dutch groceries. Package sizes varied, so measure the crushed crumbs rather than trusting a count. Dry unseasoned breadcrumbs or crushed zwieback substitute directly.
- The fat is a lotHalf a pound of butter plus 3 tablespoons of lard for a single 2-quart pudding is very generous. Around 6 tablespoons of butter will coat a few cups of crumbs; beyond that the fat tends to pool in the pan. Scale down unless you want the richness the original intends.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for the stated 30 minutes browns the sugared top and sets the layers without drying the crumbs further.
- Applesauce consistencyCook it down thicker than you would for eating out of hand, and sweeten it lightly. Loose sauce soaks the crumbs through and the torte slumps when turned out.
- Turning outGrease the pan heavily, as directed. The recipe turns the torte out onto a plate and only slices it once cold; it holds a slice far better fully cooled than warm.
- YieldA 2-quart pan serves eight to ten. Whipped cream, unsweetened or barely sweetened, is the traditional accompaniment.
Layered fried breadcrumbs and stewed apple is a long-established thrift dessert in northern Europe, known in Sweden as dppelkaka and in Germany and Denmark under closely related names; the same idea appears in English cookery as apple charlotte. It is often said to have arisen because dry bread was too valuable to throw away and butter made it palatable. Its appearance in a Presbyterian church cookbook from Libertyville, Illinois, sits against the background of heavy Scandinavian and German settlement in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, where such contributor-signed collections preserved immigrant home cooking under names like this one, though the book itself tells us nothing about this particular contributor. The Holland rusk called for here was a commercially packaged product widely stocked in American groceries in the early twentieth century, and its use marks the point where an old make-do dish had begun buying its stale bread ready-made.