Apples, Buttered
INGREDIENTS for 1 dish.—Apple marmalade or a few good boiling apples, 1/2 pint of water, 6 oz. of sugar, 2 oz. of butter, a little apricot jam. INGREDIENTS for 1 dish. Apple marmalade or a few good boiling apples, 1/2 pint of water, 6 oz. of sugar, 2 oz. of butter. little apricot jam.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d. a Pare the apples, and take out the cores with a scoop; boil up the sugar and water for a few minutes; then lay in the apples and simmer them very gently until tender, taking care not to let them break. Have ready sufficient marmalade made by the recipe for APPLE MARMALADE, flavoured with lemon, to cover the bottom of the dish; arrange the apples on this, with a piece of butter placed in each, and in between them a few spoonfuls of apricot jam or marmalade; put the dish in the oven for 10 minutes, then sprinkle over the top sifted sugar, and either brown it before the fire or with a salamander, and serve hot. The syrup that the apples were boiled in should be saved for another time.
TIME. From 20 to 30 minutes to stew the apples very gently; 10 minutes in the oven.
APPLES, FLANC OF.
A straightforward poached-apple dessert whose success rests almost entirely on keeping the fruit whole. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: a bare simmerCored whole apples collapse the moment the syrup breaks into a real boil. Keep the liquid at a lazy tremble, cover loosely, and turn the apples with a spoon rather than lifting them out and back.
- UnitsHalf a pint is 10 fl oz in British measure, so about 1 1/4 cups. Six ounces of sugar is a generous 3/4 cup (about 170 g); 2 oz of butter is half a stick.
- "Good boiling apples"Means a cooking variety that holds shape without going to fluff. Bramley breaks down fast and is the wrong choice here; firmer apples such as Golden Delicious, Braeburn or a russet-type are the better bet for staying whole, though timing will vary with the fruit.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, will serve for the 10-minute stint; the dish only needs heating through before the sugar is browned.
- The salamanderA long-handled iron plate heated red and held over the food to glaze it. A grill or broiler on its highest setting, or a kitchen blowtorch, does the same job in a minute or two. Watch it constantly; sifted sugar goes from amber to black quickly.
- Apple marmaladeIn Beeton this is a thick sweetened apple purée, not a citrus preserve. A stiff, well-reduced applesauce flavoured with lemon zest and juice serves the same purpose as the base layer.
- Yield and serving"For 1 dish" means one shallow baking dish holding as many apples as fit in a single layer; the number, and so the number served, depends on the dish and the size of the fruit. Serve hot with cream or a thin custard.
- The saved syrupWorth following. Strained and reduced, it keeps a week or two refrigerated and can poach the next batch of fruit or glaze a tart.
Buttered apples belong to a large family of Victorian "dressed fruit" dishes in which whole poached apples were arranged on a sweet base, enriched, glazed and sent to table hot — the same logic as the flanc of apples that follows it in Beeton's alphabetical arrangement. The costing of 1s. 6d. is a reminder of what the book was really for: Mrs Beeton's original 1861 Book of Household Management is generally understood to have been aimed at the mistress of a modest servant-keeping household, and the printed prices are often said to have allowed her to check the cook's accounts. Apples were among the cheaper English keeping fruits, and recipes like this one existed to make something presentable out of fruit past its best for eating raw. The apricot jam is doing a job it does throughout nineteenth-century confectionery — supplying sharpness and gloss where fresh apricots were unavailable for most of the year.