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Apple and Custard
1039. Prepare apples as for sauce, only stiffer; allow them to remain till cold. Put them into a simple mould to give a shape to them, or pile them in the centre of your dish and pour a custard over them.
A Victorian assembly dish rather than a cooked pudding: thick apple purée set in a shape, drowned in pouring custard. Everything depends on how far you reduce the apples.
- "Only stiffer" is the whole recipeCook peeled, cored, sliced apples with barely any water, covered, then uncover and drive off moisture over low heat, stirring, until the purée mounds on the spoon and holds a furrow. Bramleys or another cooking apple collapse to a purée readily; dessert apples need mashing or a quick blitz.
- No quantities are givenReckon about 2 lb (900 g) apples and 3-4 oz (75-100 g) sugar for four people, sweetened to taste. Cook the sugar in with the fruit, not after.
- Cold means coldLetting the purée stand until cold matters. Warm purée will thin and slump, and will dilute the custard poured over it. Chill it thoroughly, several hours or overnight.
- The mouldA "simple mould" here most likely means a plain unfluted basin or dariole; rinse it with cold water so the pur\gelatine is mentioned, so the shape holds only if the purée is genuinely stiff; the alternative of piling it in the middle of a dish is more forgiving.
- The custardThe recipe assumes a stirred pouring custard made to a separate receipt: roughly 4 egg yolks and 1 oz sugar to a pint (570 ml) of milk or single cream, cooked over low heat until it coats the back of a spoon (around 180F/82C), then strained and cooled. It should be thin enough to flow around the apple, not to set.
- FlavouringLemon peel or a clove or two cooked with the apples and lifted out before moulding, and vanilla or a little grated lemon in the custard, are common flavourings of the period. Both are optional and neither appears in the text.
- Yield and servingOn the quantities suggested above, four to six. Pour the custard at the table so the mould does not sit in liquid and soften at the base.
Numbered entries like this one belong to a style of cookery book in which a receipt was often little more than a note reminding a cook of something she already knew how to do, cross-referring to apple sauce and to custard elsewhere in the same book. The dish belongs to a large family of English apple-and-custard sweets, the best known being apple snow and the trifle-like arrangements that put stewed fruit under a pouring custard; moulding fruit purée into a shape without gelatine was a cheap way to give a plain pudding some presence on the table. The cooking apple was a mainstay of the autumn and winter store cupboard, barrelled keeping apples being among the few fruits a household could count on for months.