Home › Vegetable Gelatine › Apple Gateau
Apple Gateau
1 pound of apples 3 ounces of loaf sugar 1/2 ounce of vegetable gelatine Juice of 1/2 lemon 1 pint of water Peel and core the apples; cut them into quarters, and stew them with the water, sugar and lemon juice until tender, but not broken. Take them out carefully, and add the gelatine to the liquid, stir until melted, and return the apple for a few minutes. Rinse out a mold with cold water; pour in, and stand until firm.
A simple apple jelly set with agar rather than animal gelatine, which is why it sits in a vegetarian book. Almost everything hinges on how the setting agent is handled.
- Vegetable gelatine is agar-agarSold today as agar flakes, powder or bars, usually from Japanese or health-food suppliers. It is not interchangeable spoon-for-spoon with leaf or powdered gelatine, and it sets at room temperature rather than needing a refrigerator.
- It must boil, not merely meltThe instruction to "stir until melted" understates it. Agar only hydrates properly at a full boil held for two to five minutes; if the syrup is only warmed, the gateau will never set. Boil the liquid with the agar before returning the apples.
- The quantity is generousHalf an ounce of agar (about 14 g) to a pint of liquid gives roughly a two to three percent set, which is firm and sliceable, closer to a Turkish delight than a wobbling jelly. If you prefer something softer, a third of that weight is nearer modern practice.
- Which pintIf the book is British, as the ingredients suggest, a pint is the imperial 20 fl oz, about 570 ml, rather than the American 16 oz; the "mold" spelling leaves a little doubt. Erring toward the larger volume also softens the very firm set.
- Loaf sugarSugar broken from a cone or pressed block, chemically no different from today's granulated white sugar. Three ounces is about 85 g, and it is a lightly sweetened dish by modern standards.
- Keeping the quarters wholeUse a firm cooking apple that holds its shape rather than a Bramley, which collapses. Poach at a bare simmer and lift the pieces out the moment a knife meets no resistance.
- The moldRinsing with cold water rather than oiling is deliberate; the film of water lets the set jelly release cleanly. A one-quart mold or loaf tin suits this quantity.
- Yield and servingProbably serves four to six as a light dessert, turned out and sliced. Custard or thin cream would be a plausible accompaniment.
Vegetable gelatine is agar-agar, extracted from red seaweeds and long used in East and Southeast Asian kitchens before European cooks took it up in the nineteenth century, both as an imported food thickener and, from the 1880s, as a laboratory culture medium. Its appeal to a meatless cookbook is straightforward: ordinary gelatine is boiled from the bones, hides and trotters of animals, which puts every jelly, blancmange and moulded cream out of reach of a vegetarian household. The name gateau appears to be used loosely here, as it often was at the time, for something turned out of a mould in a shapely block rather than for a cake in the modern sense.