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Chartreuse De Pommes
1117. Well boil half a pound of the best Carolina rice in a quart of fresh milk, taking the greatest pains to prevent it from catching at the bottom of the saucepan. Pare seven large or nine middling-sized Kentish pippins, take out the cores without cutting the fruit quite through, put a little raspberry jam into each hole, and fill up with cream. Edge a deep pie-dish with a rich light paste; lay in the apples, and level up the spaces between them with the boiled rice. Brush it over with the yolk of an egg, dust it well with pounded loaf sugar, decorate it with a few pieces of candied lemon or orange peel, and bake it for about forty minutes in a brisk oven. This dish is better caten hot.
A rice-and-apple pudding built in a pie dish rather than a mould, from a period when "chartreuse" simply meant a dish assembled in a decorative pattern. The main risk is the rice: half a pound to a quart of milk is a thick mixture that scorches easily.
- The rice, and the catchingHalf a pound is about 1 cup dry rice; a quart of fresh milk is roughly 4 cups (a British quart of the period is closer to 5 cups, and either will work). Cook it over the lowest heat with frequent stirring, or set the pan on a heat diffuser "catches" means scorches, and scorched milk will flavour the whole dish. The rice should be soft and stiff enough to hold a shape, not soupy.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice exported from the Carolina lowcountry and commonly specified in Victorian British cookery books. Any long-grain white rice works; regular pudding rice or arborio gives a creamier, stickier result, which is no loss here.
- Kentish pippinsA firm, tart cooking apple. Bramley, Granny Smith or Braeburn all substitute; avoid soft eating apples, which collapse and flood the dish. Seven large apples is roughly 3 to 3 1/2 lb.
- Coring without cutting throughUse an apple corer from the stem end and stop short of the base, or hollow the centre with a melon baller, leaving a plug of flesh at the bottom so the jam and cream stay put. A teaspoon of jam per apple, then top with heavy cream.
- Rich light pasteA shortcrust enriched with extra butter and an egg yolk, or use bought puff. It edges the dish only " a collar around the rim " and is not a full lining or lid.
- Pounded loaf sugarLoaf sugar was a hard cone broken up and crushed at home; caster or granulated sugar is the direct equivalent. Dust generously so it glazes over the egg wash.
- A brisk ovenRoughly 400-425F (200-220C). Forty minutes at that heat browns the pastry and sugar and just cooks the apples through; test with a skewer at the thickest apple. If the tops colour too fast, lay foil loosely over them for the last ten minutes.
- YieldServes six to eight, and, as the original says, it is much better hot " the rice stiffens and dulls as it cools.
A chartreuse in nineteenth-century cookery was a dish packed into a mould or dish in a deliberate pattern, usually vegetables or forcemeat lining game or poultry; the name is traditionally linked to the Carthusian monks and their meatless kitchen, though that derivation is a customary explanation rather than a documented one. This version keeps the architecture and drops the meat: whole apples standing upright, their gaps grouted with milk-boiled rice, the whole ringed with pastry.