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Apple Cream
Pare, core and mince fine some good cooking-apples, put them into a stewpan with a piece of butter, a little powdered white sugar and mix in a little water, adding a small quantity of beaten egg. Add to this a few drops of lemon or orange essence to flavor. Stir smartly over a quick fire for about ten minutes. This makes a nice relish for tea, or a good sauce for a batter-pudding.
A loose, quantity-free formula of the kind Oscar's kitchen notes often are: it assumes a cook who can judge by eye. The one thing worth controlling is the egg, which is what turns the mixture from stewed apple into something with body.
- Working quantitiesNothing is measured in the original. For a workable batch: 4 medium cooking apples (about 1 1/2 lb), 2 tablespoons butter, 3 to 4 tablespoons sugar, 2 tablespoons water, and one beaten egg added at the end. That yields roughly two cups, enough for four as a pudding sauce.
- "A quick fire"Nineteenth-century range language for high heat. On a modern burner, medium-high is the practical equivalent; a full flame under a thin pan will scorch the sugar before the apples soften.
- The egg is the hingeAdding beaten egg straight into a hot pan gives you scrambled apple. Pull the pan off the heat, stir a spoonful or two of the hot apple into the egg to temper it, then return the lot to low heat and stir until it thickens. It should never come to a boil after the egg goes in.
- Ten minutes of stirringIn the original the beaten egg goes in before the ten minutes over the fire, so the figure covers the whole cooking rather than a pre-egg stage. Covering the pan for the first few minutes to let the apples steam, then uncovering to stir off the excess moisture, is one workable modern approach.
- Lemon or orange essencePeriod essences varied in strength and are not directly comparable with modern concentrated extracts, so add cautiously: no more than 1/4 teaspoon, or substitute a teaspoon of fresh zest, which is close to what the flavouring was reaching for.
- Which apples"Good cooking-apples" meant tart varieties that collapse when cooked — Bramley in Britain, and Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening or Gravenstein in Oscar's New York. Granny Smith or McIntosh work; a firm eating apple such as Honeycrisp will stay in stubborn cubes.
- ServingServe warm as a sauce over batter pudding or a plain steamed pudding. The original says only that it makes 'a nice relish for tea' and does not specify how it was served at table. It keeps three or four days refrigerated, but because of the egg it should not be treated as a shelf-stable preserve.
Apple cream belongs to a large family of Victorian and Edwardian egg-thickened fruit pastes — apple, lemon and orange "creams" and "curds" — that sat somewhere between a sauce, a spread and a dessert. The name is generally taken to refer to the texture the egg and butter give rather than to any dairy cream in the pan, though this is a reading rather than a documented origin. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book among grander Waldorf dishes is a reminder that his collection was addressed to domestic readers as well as hotel cooks: the tea table was a serious institution, and a cook needed a stock of small sweet things that could be made quickly from apples already in the house. The instruction to flavor with "a few drops of essence" rather than fresh fruit reflects the period's enthusiasm for bottled flavoring extracts.<br><br>The double use suggested at the end — relish for tea, or sauce for a batter-pudding — was typical of thrift-minded writing of the era, where one preparation was expected to earn its place at more than one meal.