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Red Apples in Jelly (Take some prettily formed)
1107. Take some prettily formed apples of the pear main, or nonsuch kind, put them into a stewpan, with enough water to cover them; add a spoonful of powdered cochineal, and simmer gently; when the fruit is done take it out, and put it into a dessert dish. Make a syrup of the liquor by adding white sugar and the juice of two lemons; when boiled to a jelly put it with the apples, decorating the dish with the lemon peel cut into thin slips.
A Victorian poached-apple dessert that depends on two things the original leaves unsaid: how much sugar goes into the syrup, and how little colouring you actually need.
- The applesPearmain and Nonsuch are old English varieties rarely sold now. Use any firm dessert-cooking apple that holds its shape — Braeburn, Cox, Pink Lady or Bramley if you like it softer. Six medium apples serve six; whole apples look best if you core them from the blossom end and leave them unpeeled or half-peeled so they do not collapse.
- Cochineal — use a fractionPowdered cochineal was a kitchen colouring of variable strength, often sold cut with other ingredients; a spoonful of modern carmine or cochineal extract would be excessive and would taste of it. A few drops of liquid food colouring will do the same job. Note that cochineal is made from scale insects, so it is not suitable for vegans, and a small number of people react to carmine.
- The unstated sugarThe recipe gives no quantity. Strain the poaching liquor and use roughly equal volumes of liquid and white sugar — about a cup of sugar per cup of liquor — which is the standard proportion for a clear apple jelly.
- What sets itThere is no gelatine here. The set comes from apple pectin plus the acid of the two lemons, so the peel and cores are worth leaving in the poaching water and straining out later. Boil the syrup to about 220F/104C, or until a spoonful wrinkles on a chilled saucer.
- Poaching timeSimmer gently and covered, 15 to 25 minutes depending on size and variety. Test with a skewer at the thickest point; boiled hard, the fruit splits and the point of the dish is lost.
- The lemon peel garnishPare the peel in wide strips before juicing, then cut into fine julienne and blanch a minute in boiling water to take out the bitterness. Scatter over the jelly once it has begun to cool and thicken, or the strips sink.
- AssemblyArrange the drained apples in a shallow dish, pour the hot syrup over, and chill several hours. The jelly should be just firm enough to hold the fruit rather than to be cut.
Poached whole apples dyed red and set in their own syrup were among the fruit desserts of the nineteenth-century English table, valued for looking like something more elaborate than boiled fruit. The varieties named place it in an older orchard world: the Pearmain is among the earliest English apple names on record, appearing in medieval documents, while Nonsuch and Nonpareil were kitchen and dessert apples known through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cochineal, imported from Spanish America and long the standard scarlet dye of both dyers and confectioners, was sold to households in powder and in tincture, and appears throughout the period's cookery books for tinting jellies, creams and sugar work.