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Apple Flamingo
8 apples (red) 2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 cups sugar 1 cup water 1 cup cream 2 tablespoons orange juice grated rind one half lemon grated rind one half orange Wipe apples; arrange in baking dish; add sugar and water, and cook until tender, turning so that all sides may be evenly cooked. Be sure and preserve the shape. Remove skin in a way to leave bright coloring on the apple.
Boil syrup until thick, add fruit juice and rind, pour around apples, and garnish with beaten cream. 3 cups quartered apples 2 tablespoons butter * cup sugar Apple Soufflé 3 egg yolks 6 egg whites nutmeg and lemon juice Steam apples; add butter, sugar, yolks of eggs and flavoring. Cool, cut and fold in beaten whites, turn into buttered pudding dish, and bake forty-five minutes in a moderate oven. 1 cup sugar teaspoon cinnamon 2 tablespoons lemon Serve with sugar and cream. grated rind of one lemon cup butter
A simple baked-apple dessert whose whole effect rests on colour and shape: the apples are cooked whole in a heavy syrup, then peeled so the dye from the red skins stays on the flesh. Handle them as little as possible.
- Choose the apple for shape, not flavour aloneYou need a firm red variety that will not collapse — Rome Beauty, Braeburn, Jonathan or a red-skinned Gala. Softer apples such as McIntosh will burst and defeat the point of the dish.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature; 'moderate oven' appears only in the soufflé that follows on the page, and a moderate oven of the period is usually read as roughly 350 to 375F. At that heat apples of this size will take somewhere between 40 and 60 minutes; test with a skewer at the stem end and stop as soon as it slides in.
- Turning without damageBasting with the syrup from a spoon does most of the work of "turning" and risks far less than rolling the fruit. If you do turn them, use two spoons and support the whole apple.
- The peeling is the hingeAfter cooking, the skin should slip off in strips while the fruit is still warm, carrying its pigment into the outer flesh. If the apples are cold the skin tears and takes the colour with it, and the dish loses its name.
- Boiling the syrupTwo cups sugar to one cup water reduced until thick is somewhere around the thread stage, usually given as about 223 to 234F, though the recipe offers no test of its own. Take it off before it colours — caramel will muddy the pink.
- Add the juice and rind off the heatAdd the juice and rind after the syrup thickens -- The orange and lemon juice go in after the syrup is thick, not before; acid added early inverts some of the sugar, which discourages crystallisation and keeps the syrup softer. The recipe does not say to take the pan off the heat. Adding the rind at the end keeps its oils fresh.
- "Beaten cream"Whipped cream. The recipe does not say whether to sweeten it, though the syrup already carries two cups of sugar. Whip the cup of cream listed to soft peaks; the direction is only to garnish with it.
- YieldEight apples, one to a person. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Lowney's, a Boston chocolate firm, published cook books partly as advertising, and its dessert chapters lean on the showy, inexpensive fruit dishes that filled American dessert courses before the First World War. The name here is most likely pure presentation: flamingo for the pink the red skins leave behind, part of a long fashion for dishes titled by their colour — sunset pudding, snow apples, rose cream. Whole apples poached or baked in heavy syrup were standard household work in a period when apples were the cheapest keeping fruit in the Northeast and a barrel or two might sit in the cellar all winter; the trick of peeling after cooking to tint the flesh is a thrift dressed up as an ornament.