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Apple Filling
Grate two large, fine-flavored sour apples into a saucepan, add to them the juice and grated rind of one lemon, and one cup of sugar, and cook for five minutes, stirring continually. The addition of one tablespoon of sherry will greatly improve the flavor for many tastes. When the filling is cold, spread it upon layers of cake.
A quick stovetop apple curd-of-sorts, thickened only by pectin and evaporation. It is simple, but two details decide whether it sets firmly enough to hold cake layers.
- "Sour apples"Means a tart cooking apple, not a spoiled one. Granny Smith, Bramley or Rhode Island Greening give both the acidity and the pectin the filling depends on; a sweet Red Delicious will produce sugary slush.
- Grate, do not peel firstGrating -- The recipe does not say to peel. Grating the whole apple, skin and all, on a box grater is one plausible reading; skin adds pectin and will soften in a few minutes' cooking. Peel if you dislike the flecks, and expect a slightly looser filling.
- Five minutes is a minimumTwo large apples yield roughly 1 1/2 cups of pulp, and five minutes of hard boiling may not drive off enough water. Cook until a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a track that closes slowly, which can take eight to ten minutes.
- Stirring continuallyNot fussiness. One cup of sugar to this little liquid scorches fast, so keep the heat moderate and the spoon moving across the bottom of the pan.
- The lemonOne lemon's juice and zest is about 3 tablespoons and 1 tablespoon respectively. It is doing acid and pectin work as much as flavour, so do not cut it.
- SherryA dry or medium sherry. The recipe does not say when to add it; off the heat preserves more of the aroma, in which case the alcohol is not cooked off, though one tablespoon spread through a whole cake amounts to very little.
- Cool completelyThe filling thickens substantially as it cools and will run out from between the layers if spread warm. Chill it, and stack the cake shortly before serving so the crumb does not go soggy.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; expect roughly one to one and a half cups, enough for two layers of an 8- or 9-inch cake. Pair with a plain butter frosting or a boiled icing rather than anything else fruit-flavoured.
Fruit fillings like this belong to the era when a layer cake was assembled at home from whatever the pantry and the orchard offered, and lemon, apple, fig and raisin fillings all appear in the same chapters of American household manuals around 1900. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern company's publishing arm -- Butterick also published The Delineator -- and was aimed at the middle-class housekeeper; its cake chapters assume a cook with layers to fill and no jar of commercial jam to reach for. The method leans on the apple's own pectin, with sugar and lemon, to set the filling: the same property that makes apple useful in home preserving. The optional sherry reflects nineteenth-century flavouring habits, when wines and spirits stood in the cupboard beside the rosewater and the vanilla.