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Blushing Apples
6 red apples 1 1/2 cups sugar 1 1/2 cups water Whipped cream Core the apples. Cook in sirup made of sugar and water, turning so that they will cook evenly until they are tender. Carefully remove the skin, scraping the red pulp from it and basting on the sides of the apple. Put the apples in a serving-dish. Reduce the sirup to one cup, and add the grated rind and juice of one orange, the juice of one lemon, and if desired, nuts, candied orange-peel, or raisins. Pour sirup over apples and serve with whipped cream.
A simple poached-apple dessert whose whole effect depends on coaxing the red colour out of the skins and back onto the flesh.
- Choose the apples for skin colourThe blush comes entirely from the pigment in the peel, so use a deeply red variety with firm flesh -- Rome Beauty, Jonathan, Braeburn or a red-skinned Gala. Green or yellow apples will poach perfectly well and look like nothing at all.
- The hinge: skin off, colour onCook the apples whole and unpeeled, then slip the skins off while the fruit is still hot and scrape the softened red pulp from the inside of each skin, painting it back over the apple. Peel first and there is no blush.
- Poaching, not boilingKeep the syrup at a bare simmer and turn the apples every few minutes so they colour evenly. Depending on size and variety this takes 15 to 30 minutes; test with a skewer at the thickest part and stop while they still hold their shape.
- Reducing the syrupLift the apples out first, then boil the syrup hard to reduce it to the one cup the recipe calls for. Add the orange and lemon juice off the heat so the fresh citrus flavour is not cooked away.
- Sugar levelA cup and a half of sugar to a cup and a half of water is a heavy syrup by current taste. Cutting to one cup of sugar should still poach the fruit and still reduce to a pourable glaze.
- VesselUse a wide pan deep enough that the syrup comes at least halfway up the apples, and only just large enough to hold six -- they should sit snugly so the shallow syrup covers as much surface as possible.
- Yield and servingSix apples, one per person. Best served warm or at room temperature with the syrup spooned over; the whipped cream should be unsweetened, given the syrup.
Poached whole apples in sugar syrup were a familiar American dessert of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cheap enough for a weeknight and decorative enough for company. The trick of scraping pigment from the discarded skins back onto the peeled fruit gets its colour without any added colouring. The orange rind, candied peel and raisins finishing the syrup mark it as a company version rather than nursery food.