Apple Nests
8 apples 2 cups milk 2 tablespoons flour 3 egg yolks 3 egg whites 1 teaspoon salt Arrange cored and pared apples in a buttered baking dish. Mix sugar, flour, milk; add yolks of eggs; when well blended, the well-beaten whites. Pour this mixture over apples and bake in a moderate oven until apples are tender.
A baked custard poured over whole cored apples, from a 1907 Boston book. The ingredient list is incomplete, so read the method before you shop.
- Missing sugarThe method says "Mix sugar, flour, milk" but no sugar appears in the list. For 2 cups of milk and eight apples, something in the range of 1/2 to 2/3 cup would be a reasonable guess. Sweeten to the apples you have.
- The saltA full teaspoon in a sweet custard reads high to a modern palate and may be a printer's slip for a saltspoon (about 1/4 teaspoon). Start at 1/4 teaspoon.
- Moderate oven350F. The custard sets at around 170-175F internally; much hotter and it curdles and weeps around the apples.
- Apple choiceWhole cored apples need a variety that holds shape — Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Northern Spy. A soft baker such as McIntosh will collapse into the custard before it sets.
- The hinge: the two cook at different ratesWhole apples take 40-60 minutes; the custard sets in 30-40. Choose apples of even, modest size (about 6 oz), or give them a 15-minute head start in the buttered dish before pouring the custard over.
- Folding the whitesBeaten whites added last make the custard puff up around each apple. Fold gently and bake immediately; a batter left standing loses the lift.
- Water bathA roasting pan of hot water around the baking dish keeps the edges from setting hard before the centre is done.
- YieldEight apples, eight servings. Serve warm rather than hot; the custard firms as it cools.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer — one of the many turn-of-the-century cookbooks published by a food firm to keep its product in the kitchen, though the volume ranges far beyond cocoa. Dishes of this kind, whole apples baked under a sweetened egg-and-milk batter, run through nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery under a shifting set of names — apple custard, apple pudding, and here "nests." The flour stabilises the eggs against curdling in a hot oven, a trick that mattered a great deal more when oven temperature was judged by hand rather than by dial.