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Fruit Crusts
Cut slices of stale bread into pieces one inch thick with an oval cutter, also some others of a round shape; scoop out a small hollow in the center of them, fry in butter until lightly browned, and mask them inside with a little orange marmalade. Mix some preserved cherries with a salpicon of preserved fruits, thicken it with a little apricot marmalade, and add a little Madeira or sherry wine; put some fruit in the hollow of each crust. Fry a thick, round, flat block of bread, put it in the center of a dish and arrange the oval crusts almost upright, leaning around it; lay the round crusts on the top, stick some fruits on silver skewers and fix them in the top of the bread support. Mask the bottom of the dish and the crusts with a little apricot sauce to which has been added a little Madeira, and serve with more sauce in a sauceboat, with a few Smyrna raisins that have been boiled in syrup for two minutes mixed up in it.
This is a dessert built as much as cooked: fried bread croutons filled with brandied fruit, stacked around a bread pedestal. Nothing in it is difficult, but the assembly assumes a kitchen brigade's habits, and a few of the terms have shifted.
- SalpiconA salpicon is simply a mixture of ingredients cut into small, even dice — here preserved fruits, cut about a quarter-inch. It is not a sauce or a paste; the dice should stay visible in the apricot binder.
- MaskTo mask is to coat with a thin, even layer so the surface underneath is hidden. Applied here to both the inside of the crusts and the finished dish, it means a brushed or spooned glaze, not a pour.
- Apricot marmaladeIn this period the word generally meant a thick fruit reduction, closer to what a modern kitchen calls strained apricot jam or apricot glaze. Warm ordinary apricot preserves and push them through a sieve to remove the fruit pieces; that will serve for the thickener the recipe calls for. Note that the recipe names an apricot sauce separately for masking and the sauceboat.
- Stale bread is the pointFresh bread collapses in butter and will not hold an oval cut or a scooped hollow. Use a firm white loaf a day or two old, cut a full inch thick as directed, and fry in clarified butter so the milk solids do not burn before the crust colors.
- The bread supportThe central block is a socle — a structural pedestal, not something anyone eats. Cut it wide and flat enough that the oval crusts leaning against it cannot slide, and fry it on all faces so it does not soften under the sauce.
- The raisinsSmyrna raisins are a golden sultana; any good sultana substitutes. The brief turn in syrup is meant only to plump them before they go into the sauce.
- Assemble at the last momentThe crusts go soggy quickly once masked with apricot glaze and loaded with wet fruit. Fry and cool them ahead, then fill, stack and sauce immediately before it goes to the table, and serve warm rather than hot.
- YieldNo quantity is given. As a rough guide only, reckoning one oval and one round crust per person, a loaf and a couple of cups of mixed preserved fruit would serve a small table; scale the apricot sauce to suit and hold some back for the sauceboat.
Fried bread and fruit was old, cheap and domestic long before it reached the Waldorf. What marks this version as hotel cookery of the 1890s is the architecture: a socle of fried bread, crusts leaning upright around it, fruits raised on silver skewers. That vertical, sculptural style of presentation came out of the grand French kitchens of the nineteenth century, where a dessert or a cold entrée was expected to arrive as a constructed object with an inedible base holding it up. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, is full of such assemblies, and they explain why the instructions read as a sequence of placements rather than measurements: the reader is assumed to know the components already and to need only the plan.