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Apple Porcupine
Make a syrup by boiling eight minutes one and one-half cups sugar and one and one-half cups water. Wipe, core, and pare eight apples. Put apples in syrup as soon as pared, that they may not discolor. Cook until soft, occasionally skimming syrup during cooking. Apples cook better covered with the syrup; therefore it is better to use a deep saucepan and have two cookings. Drain apples from syrup, cool, fill cavities with jelly, marmalade, or preserved fruit, and stick apples with almonds blanched and split in halves lengthwise. Serve with Cream Sauce I.
Baked Bananas I Remove skins from six bananas and cut in halves lengthwise. Put in a shallow granite pan or on an old platter. . Put in a shallow granite pan or on an old platter.
Mix two tablespoons melted butter, one-third cup sugar, and two tablespoons lemon juice. Baste bananas with onehalf the mixture . Bake twenty minutes in a slow oven, basting during baking with remaining mixture.
Two recipes have run together in this page: the porcupine apples, and a Baked Bananas recipe that begins mid-paragraph at "Remove skins from six bananas." Treat them separately.
- The hinge: apples that hold their shapeA whole pared apple poached in syrup will collapse into sauce if it is a soft baking variety. Use a firm, dense apple and pull each one the moment a skewer slides in with slight resistance; the recipe gives no time, and it will vary with variety and size. Boiling hard will split them.
- Two cookingsThe instruction is not fussiness. Eight apples crowded into one pan sit above the syrup and steam unevenly; four at a time in a deep saucepan, fully submerged, cook evenly and stay whole. The syrup is reused for the second batch.
- The syrupOne and a half cups each sugar and water boiled eight minutes gives a light syrup, thin enough to poach in. Save what is left over: reduced further it glazes the finished apples, or keeps in the refrigerator for poaching other fruit.
- AlmondsBlanched almonds split lengthwise are the quills. Buy whole blanched almonds and split them while still warm from a brief soak in hot water, otherwise they shatter. Sweet almonds only; nothing else is meant here.
- Cream Sauce IA cross-reference to a sweet cream sauce given elsewhere in the book; check the index, as similar names recur for savoury white sauces. Any thin vanilla custard or pouring cream serves.
- A slow ovenFor the bananas, a slow oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 250-325F. Twenty minutes at that heat softens them without turning them to slurry; hotter, and they will cook faster and give up more liquid.
- Granite panGraniteware, the speckled enamel-on-metal ware of the period. Any shallow ceramic or enamelled dish does the same job. The "old platter" simply means not to risk a good one in the oven.
- YieldEight apples serve eight, one each, and they are substantial. The bananas serve six. The apples, served with a sweet sauce, are clearly a dessert; the page does not say how the bananas were meant to appear.
The fruit dishes of the period sit at the point where fresh fruit was moving from a plain end-of-meal dish to something composed and decorative, and the porcupine is squarely a table ornament: a poached apple studded with split almonds so it bristles. The conceit is older than this book — hedgehog and porcupine dishes spiked with almonds appear in English cookery well before the 1890s, usually built of almond paste or a moulded cream rather than fruit. What is characteristic of the Boston Cooking School manner is the method underneath the whimsy: the exact syrup ratio, the timed boil, the flat statement that you should cook in two batches because crowded apples do not stay submerged. The banana recipe following it is a reminder of how recently bananas had become ordinary in American kitchens; large-scale importing into East Coast ports had made them cheap enough by the 1890s that a cookbook could offer several ways to bake them.