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Normandy Pippins Stewed
1/2 pound Normandy pippins 6 ounces sugar 1 quart water Wash the pippins well, and soak them over night in one quart of water. Remove the apples from the water with a spoon, so as to let all impurities sink to the bottom of the bowl. Now pour off the water that the pippins have been soaked in, and strain it over them, leaving the sediment. Add the sugar, and let them boil up quickly, when they must be well skimmed. Now put them where they will simmer slowly, until they are quite tender but unbroken and they have turned a rich brown. This will take between three and four hours. If Normandy pippins are cooked quickly they are quite spoiled.
A slow stewed compote of dried apples, dependent almost entirely on patience. The one rule the original states outright is the one to obey: any brisk boiling after the initial skim will burst the fruit and leave you with sauce.
- What Normandy pippins areWhole dried apples, sold under that trade name in British grocers well into the twentieth century. Any good whole or halved dried apple works; unsulphured fruit is likelier to give the deep brown colour the recipe promises, as sulphured fruit stays pale.
- Measures1/2 lb dried apples is roughly 2 to 3 cups of loose fruit. 6 oz sugar is a little under a cup of granulated; a quart is 4 cups. The sugar is generous by modern taste and can be reduced, though the syrup will be thinner for it.
- The overnight soakWorth doing, and not merely for softening. The instruction to lift the apples out with a spoon and decant the liquid off the sediment suggests the dried fruit was expected to carry some grit. Modern dried apples are cleaner, but the soaking water still carries the fruit's flavour and should be strained back over them.
- HeatBring to a boil once, skim, then hold at a bare shiver — surface barely moving, around 180F. On an electric hob this usually means the lowest setting with the lid ajar.
- Why so longThe recipe asks for the apples to be tender, unbroken and turned "a rich brown", and it is the colour and the thickened, syrupy liquor that need the full three to four hours. Cut the time and you get pale, sweet, wet apples.
- LiquidCheck at the halfway mark. If the syrup has reduced below the fruit, top up with hot water; exposed apple tops dry and toughen.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. Usually sent to table cold with cream or custard, the syrup spooned over. It will keep several days refrigerated.
"Pippin" is an old English word for an apple raised from seed rather than grafted, and by the nineteenth century Normandy pippins were a distinct article of commerce, the name functioning largely as a trade term. They appear constantly in Victorian and Edwardian household books as a winter standby, cheap and shelf-stable in the months between the last stored apples and the first rhubarb. The dish needed no butter, eggs or stock; that it also demanded four hours of very low heat was no obstacle in a kitchen with a range burning all day anyway.