No. 2997

Apple "pain" with Vanilla

Pain de Pommes a la Vanille

Make a pint and a half of fine apple puree, and reduce it with half a pound of sugar. Put into a vessel six ounces of butter, beat it up to a cream, adding two egg-yolks and two whole eggs, one at a time, and then a pinch of salt; when this becomes very frothy, add to it a teaspoonful of fecula, six ounces of pulverized macaroons and the apple puree. Butter and flour a plain cylindrical mold (Fig. 150), fill it up with the preparation, and lay it in a sautoir, with water to half its height, then cook it in an oven. Just when ready to serve, unmold on a dish and send to the table with a bowlful of very fine apple puree diluted with vanilla syrup.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A molded apple custard-loaf baked in a water bath, served with a thin apple-and-vanilla sauce. Ranhofer's shorthand hides two things a modern cook needs: what fecula is, and how gently this has to bake.

The hinge: gentle, even heatThe bain-marie is not optional: this is an egg-set purée, and direct oven heat risks curdling it. Ranhofer gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven (around 325F) with the water in the sautoir kept hot but never simmering is the safe reading, since a hard-boiling water bath tends to make custards coarse.
FeculaNineteenth-century kitchen French for potato starch. Cornstarch is the closest substitute at the same volume; it is only there to bind, so the quantity is forgiving.
MacaroonsDry French almond macaroons — crisp, meringue-based almond biscuits, not the coconut kind and not modern filled macarons. Amaretti or any hard almond biscuit, crushed to coarse crumbs, gives the right texture. Six ounces is roughly 1½ cups of crumbs.
The apple puréeThe apple purée -- A pint and a half is 3 cups, which needs roughly 3 lb of apples cooked down and sieved. Reduce it with the half pound of sugar until it mounds on a spoon; a loose purée will not set.
Quantities in modern terms6 oz butter is 1½ sticks; 8 oz sugar is a scant 1¼ cups. Cream the butter thoroughly before the eggs go in one at a time, as directed — the aeration is the only lift the pudding gets.
Mold and timingA plain cylindrical mold means a straight-sided charlotte-type mold; no capacity is given, so judge by the batter and allow something in the region of 1½ to 2 quarts. Butter and flour it well. Reckon on roughly 50 to 70 minutes; it is done when a skewer comes out clean and the center is just firm. Rest 10 minutes before unmolding or it may slump.
Vanilla syrupSimple syrup infused with a split vanilla bean, used here to thin the reserved purée to sauce consistency. The pudding itself is unflavored — all the vanilla in the title lives in the sauce, so make it properly fragrant.
YieldNo serving count is given. A 1½-quart mold cuts into six to eight portions; it is rich enough that small slices are right.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summation of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organized like a professional's reference rather than a home cookbook — hence the cross-references to numbered recipes and the bare mention of "Fig. 150" for the mold. A pain in this system is simply anything bound and baked in a mold and turned out as a loaf, savory or sweet: there are pains of game, of fish, and of fruit, all sharing a technique rather than an ingredient. Sweetened apple purée thickened with eggs, butter and crushed almond biscuit belongs to the same family as the charlotte and the apple marmelade desserts of French pastry, where cooked apple is treated as a structural material and not merely a filling. The dish also shows the period's habit of serving a dessert with a sauce made of the same fruit, differently handled — one version reduced and set, one loose and perfumed.