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Pommes a L'Imperatrice (Take some apples do not pare)
1102. Take some apples, do not pare them, but score them lengthwise with a sharp knife; cut a good piece off the stalk ends, and remove the cores; fill the apples with quince marmalade, apricot, or green gage jam, and put them, with the flat end downwards, into a baking dish, with a pint of chablis and two table-spoonfuls of sugar, Baste them frequently, and when done serve hot or cold in the syrup.
A simple baked apple dressed up for the table: whole unpeeled apples, cored from the top, stuffed with preserve and basted in sweetened white wine. The original assumes you know your own oven, so the numbers below are the ones it leaves out.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given; treat it as a moderate oven, 350F, for 40 to 50 minutes depending on the size and variety. The apples are done when a skewer slides through the flesh but the skins still hold their shape.
- Why you score the skinScoring lengthwise gives the skin somewhere to split as the flesh swells, so the apples do not burst apart in the dish. Cut just through the peel, not deep into the fruit.
- Choose a firm appleModern dessert apples vary enormously. A firm cooking or baking variety that holds its shape is wanted here; a soft one collapses into sauce and loses the whole point of the presentation.
- ChablisAny dry, unoaked white wine does the same work: it keeps the syrup sharp against the sweet filling. The pint here is an English pint of 20 fl oz, roughly 2 1/2 US cups, and the wine should come partway up the apples rather than cover them.
- Quince marmaladeMarmalade of this kind means a thick, stiff fruit paste rather than a citrus preserve, though citrus marmalade was also current by this date. Quince paste (membrillo) or a stiff quince cheese is the right texture; a loose jam will run out of the cavity as the apples cook.
- BastingBaste every ten minutes or so. The unpeeled tops dry and toughen otherwise, and repeated basting is what glazes them and reduces the wine to a light syrup.
- If the syrup is thinLift the apples out and boil the pan liquid down for a few minutes before spooning it over. Two tablespoons of sugar in a pint of wine gives a modestly sweet syrup by current tastes; add more only after tasting.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many apples; figure one per person, so a pint of wine will do for roughly four to six in a dish that holds them snugly upright. Good cold the next day, the syrup thickening a little as it stands.
Dishes labelled a l'imperatrice proliferated in the mid nineteenth century, when French kitchen fashion supplied the vocabulary for English dessert menus and the title is generally taken as a nod to the Empress Eugenie, consort of Napoleon III. The name signalled richness rather than any fixed formula: rice a l'imperatrice is the best-known survivor. What makes this version characteristic of its moment is the wine. Baked apples stuffed with preserve were long-standing English household cookery, but basting them in chablis and serving them in their own syrup lifts a nursery dish into something fit for a dinner table, which is precisely the transformation an imported French name was meant to announce.