No. 3000

Apples with Burnt Almonds

Pommes au Pralin

Cut six fine apples across in two; remove the cores with a column tube, peel and round the angles; cook them in a light syrup acidulated with lemon juice, being careful to keep them slightly firm. As soon as done drain, wipe, and cover with a layer of burnt almonds (No. 1); bestrew with sugar, place them on a buttered baking sheet, and set into an oven to color. Cut half-inch thick slices of savarin, and from these stamp out a dozen round pieces the same diameter as the apples; cover them on one side with apricot marmalade (No. 3675), and over this a layer of burnt almonds as used for the apples; dredge with sugar, range them on a baking sheet, and push into the oven. As soon as the crusts are browned lay them in a circle on a dish with an apple on top of each; fill the hollow of these with vanilla pastry cream (No. 46), and on top set a fine large preserved cherry (demi-sucre); fill the center of the circle with fresh strawberries, over which has been poured some sugar cooked to "small crack" (No. 171), and flavored with maraschino.

← No. 2999 Apples with Butter Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3001 Apricots a la Jefferson →

For the Modern Kitchen

A composed plated dessert from Delmonico's kitchen, built from four or five components that Ranhofer expected you to have on hand. Read it as an assembly diagram: poach, coat, toast, stack.

Burnt almonds (pralin)Not scorched nuts but caramelized almonds crushed to a coarse powder — sugar cooked to a deep amber with almonds, cooled hard on an oiled slab, then pounded. Modern praline paste is too soft; you want the dry crushed grain so it toasts rather than melts.
Column tubeAn apple corer. The halves are cored from the cut face so each keeps a neat round cavity for the pastry cream.
Keeping them firmThe hinge of the dish. Apples cooked through will collapse under the crust of almonds and the weight of the cherry. Poach in a light syrup with lemon juice, as the recipe directs, and pull them while a knife still meets resistance. Firm-fleshed varieties hold best.
SavarinA yeast-raised ring cake soaked in syrup, close kin to baba. A dense brioche or a good pound cake, cut in half-inch slices and stamped into rounds, stands in acceptably; the point is a sturdy base that browns.
"An oven to color"A brief, hot pass to set and toast the almond crust. Ranhofer gives no temperature, only the instruction to color; work hot and watch it. The sugar dredged over the top will darken quickly once it starts.
Sugar at "small crack"Petit casse, one of the degrees in Ranhofer's own sugar table at No. 171; modern tables put it somewhere in the 270s F, but check the book's figure rather than trusting one number. Poured over strawberries and flavored with maraschino it sets to brittle threads, so it must go on immediately before serving or it weeps.
Preserved cherries, demi-sucreLightly candied cherries kept in syrup, softer and less sweet than glacé fruit. A good brandied or amarena cherry is the nearest thing on a shop shelf; bright red cocktail cherries are not.
Yield and timingSix apples halved gives twelve portions, arranged as a ring on one large platter — a service dish for a table, not individual plates. Everything except the final assembly can be done ahead; the crusts and the maraschino sugar cannot.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire he ran at Delmonico's in New York over some thirty years, and its numbering system — pralin at No. 1, pastry cream at No. 46, apricot marmalade at No. 3675 — is the fingerprint of a professional kitchen where every base preparation was standing ready in the larder. Pommes au pralin belongs to the French grande cuisine tradition of the entremets chaud, the hot sweet served near the end of a long menu, and its architecture is entirely of that school: a soaked cake base, a poached fruit, a cream filling, a crisp nut crust and a sugar-glazed garnish, each element made separately and married only at the last moment. The savarin under the apple is itself a nineteenth-century Parisian invention, generally traced to the Julien brothers and named for the gastronome Brillat-Savarin. That an American restaurant could turn out a dish of this complexity is much of the point of the book — Delmonico's was arguing, dish by numbered dish, that New York could cook at the level of Paris.