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Sugar (Cup heavy cream Drain canned)
3/4 cup apricot pulp. ¾ cup heavy cream Drain canned apricots from their syrup, and rub through a sieve. Beat cream until stiff, add to apricot pulp, and sweeten to taste. Serve with German toast.
A whipped-cream and apricot sauce meant to be spooned over German toast — the book's name for what we would call French toast. It is essentially a fool, and comes together in a few minutes.
- The cream measureThe quantity reads as three-quarters of a cup of heavy cream, which whips to roughly a cup and a half. The weight of apricots is not given; one standard 15-oz can, drained, gives about a cup of pulp and balances that amount of cream well.
- Sieving the fruitCanned apricots are soft enough to push through a medium sieve with the back of a ladle, which removes skin and fibre. A blender or food processor is quicker but leaves the purée looser and paler; drain it in a fine sieve for a few minutes if it seems watery.
- Drain thoroughlyThe hinge of the dish. Any residual syrup thins the purée, and thin purée collapses whipped cream into a soupy pink liquid. Let the fruit sit in a sieve for ten minutes before pressing it through.
- Whipping and folding"Beat cream until stiff" here means firm peaks, not the near-butter stage. Fold the purée into the cream rather than stirring the cream into the fruit, and stop as soon as it is streak-free.
- SweeteningCanned apricots in heavy syrup are already sweet; taste before adding anything. If sweetening is needed, use sifted confectioners' sugar, which dissolves without grit in a cold mixture.
- Holding and yieldMakes roughly two to two and a half cups, enough for four to six servings over toast. It will hold in the refrigerator an hour or two but weeps after that; make it just before serving.
Fruit puree folded into whipped cream is an old form in English cookery: the word "fool" is recorded for a dish of this kind from the late sixteenth century, and gooseberries and other soft fruit were common bases. The canned fruit is what places this version in the American canning era; California fruit canning expanded considerably through the 1880s and 1890s, and canned apricots gave cooks a soft fruit puree out of season. German toast is the period name for bread dipped in egg and milk and fried, the dish now generally called French toast.