No. 2998

Apples, Portuguese

Pommes a la Portugaise

Peel twelve medium-sized apples, remove the cores with a column tube, and cook them in a light syrup; as soon as done drain on to a cloth, wipe and brush over with a layer of apricot marmalade (No. 3675). Cut some slices of savarin, half an inch thick, and from these cut a dozen rounds with a two and a quarter inch diameter pastry cutter; cut some grooves on one of the surfaces a quarter of an inch apart to form lozenges; strew this cut side with powdered sugar, and range the slices on a baking sheet, push into the oven to glaze, and when removed mask the glazed side with currant jelly, then dress in a circle on a dish; lay an apple on each, and fill the holes in them with currant jelly; set on each a small cream rice croquette (No. 3018), made in the shape of a three-quarter inch ball. Fill the inside of the circle with stewed cherries mingled with currant and maraschino syrup, and serve separately a sauce-boat of currant sauce, made with currant jelly dissolved in a few spoonfuls of boiling syrup, and flavored with maraschino.

← No. 2997 Apple "pain" with Vanilla Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 2999 Apples with Butter →

For the Modern Kitchen

A composed plated dessert of the Delmonico school: poached apples on glazed savarin rounds, with rice croquettes and cherries. Nothing here is difficult, but it depends on cross-references and on apples that hold their shape.

Apple choice is the hingeThe apples must stay whole through poaching and then support a croquette. Use a firm variety that holds — Golden Delicious, Braeburn, Pink Lady — and avoid McIntosh or anything that collapses. Poach at a bare simmer, never a rolling boil, and test with a skewer rather than trusting a clock.
"Column tube"A cylindrical cutter used to bore the core straight through, leaving a tube-shaped cavity. An apple corer does the same job; the hole is meant to be wide enough to be filled with jelly afterward.
Light syrupA light poaching syrup: enough sugar to keep the fruit firm and glossy, not enough to candy it. Add a strip of lemon peel and a squeeze of juice to keep the apples pale.
SavarinA yeast-raised, ring-baked butter cake, the same batter as rum baba. Day-old savarin or brioche cuts cleanly into half-inch slices; fresh cake tears when you groove it. A firm pound cake is the nearest supermarket substitute, though it is denser.
Glazing the sugared side"Push into the oven to glaze" means caramelizing the powdered sugar in the scored lozenges, not baking the cake through. A very hot oven for a few minutes, or a broiler watched constantly; sugar goes from amber to black quickly.
The cross-referencesNo. 3675 apricot marmalade is a sieved, reduced apricot glaze — warmed apricot preserve pushed through a strainer does the same work. No. 3018 cream rice croquettes are stiff vanilla rice pudding chilled, rolled, breaded and fried; they must be cold and firm before shaping into three-quarter-inch balls.
MaraschinoIn 1894 this meant true maraschino liqueur, distilled from marasca cherries and their pits, not the sweet red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Luxardo or a similar bottling is what the currant sauce and cherry syrup are built on.
Yield and timingTwelve apples serve twelve. Everything except the glazed savarin rounds can be made ahead: poach and glaze the apples, fry and chill the croquettes, stew the cherries. Assemble at the last moment or the cake bases soften under the fruit.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how a restaurant of that period built a dessert: not one preparation but several, cross-referenced to other numbers in the book and assembled into a ring on a silver dish. The "a la Portugaise" tag in nineteenth-century French cookery is loose and rarely geographic in any strict sense — in savory work it usually signals tomato, while in pastry and entremets it tends to mean oranges or a sweet-fruit garnish, so the name here likely reflects convention rather than any Portuguese original. What the recipe really documents is the labor economy of a brigade kitchen: apricot glaze, currant jelly, savarin, stewed cherries and rice croquettes were all standing preparations, so a cook assembling this had only to poach the apples and glaze the cake rounds. The maraschino, then a fashionable Dalmatian import, was the flourish that marked the dish as a restaurant sweet rather than a domestic one.