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Apple Meringue
4 large tart apples 1/3 cup cold water Sugar to taste Grated cocoanut Grated rind of 1 lemon White of 1 egg 1½ tablespoons sugar Peel, core and slice the apples; stew them in the water until soft; press through a colander; sweeten to taste and flavor with lemon rind. Make a meringue of the egg and sugar; put the apples in a pudding dish and cover them with it, dusting all with grated nuts or cocoanut. Brown in the oven; serve with cream.
A plain stewed-apple pudding under a thin soft meringue. Two things in the text need attention before you start: the oven is unspecified, and the last line belongs to the next recipe.
- The stray line"1 pint berries 1/2 cup water" is the opening of the following recipe. It has nothing to do with the apple meringue and should be ignored.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. To brown a soft meringue, roughly 350F for 12-15 minutes will set the white through rather than merely colouring the peaks.
- The meringue is deliberately thinOne white with 1 1/2 tablespoons of sugar is a soft meringue, not the 2-to-4 tablespoons per white used for a pie topping. It will be light and slightly foamy rather than marshmallowy, and it will weep if it sits. Serve it the day it is made.
- Apples and sugarFour large tart apples come to roughly 2 lb, yielding about 2 1/2 cups of pulp. "Sugar to taste" for that quantity generally lands between 1/3 and 2/3 cup depending on the fruit; sweeten while the pulp is hot so it dissolves.
- Through a colanderThe instruction is to press the cooked apple through a colander, which gives a coarse sauce, not a purée. A food mill on the medium plate is the closest modern equivalent; a blender makes it too smooth and slack to hold the meringue up.
- CocoanutThis may be fresh grated or packaged desiccated; unsweetened desiccated is the practical substitute. If you use the sweetened flaked kind, cut the sugar in the apples, and watch it closely in the oven since it colours faster.
- Lemon rindGrate it into the hot apple rather than during the stewing, so the oils are not driven off. Take only the yellow zest.
- YieldProbably about four servings in a 1-quart dish; the recipe gives no yield. "Serve with cream" most likely means plain pouring cream rather than whipped.
Apple meringue belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century "apple snow" and "apple float" desserts, all built on the same economy: stewed fruit stretched with a single beaten egg white. This is the baked branch of that family, where the white goes on top and is browned, rather than being whipped cold into the pulp. The coconut is the period detail worth noticing. Desiccated coconut came to be sold in packets in American groceries and moved from a luxury to a pantry staple, which is why a thrifty apple pudding can call for it as casually as for lemon rind.