Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › A Nice Dessert Dish
A Nice Dessert Dish
Mrs. J. Thorney.
Fill a quart bowl with alternate layers of thinly sliced apples and sugar, and add half a cup of water, covered with a saucer, held in place by a weight; bake slowly three hours; let it stand until cold, and you will turn out a round mass of clear red slices, imbedded in firm jelly. For an accompaniment to a dessert of blanc mange, rennet custard, cold rice pudding, or similar dishes, or even with nice bread and butter, there is nothing better.
A baked apple mould that relies on nothing but fruit, sugar and time. The three hours are not padding — that is where the colour and the set come from.
- Bake slowly means 300FBake slowly -- the book gives no temperatures; on a modern dial a low oven of roughly 275-300F answers to it. Anything hotter and the slices collapse into sauce before the juice has time to reduce and turn red.
- The colour is chemistry, not dyeThe clear red comes from long, gentle heating of the apple with sugar. Rushing it gives you pale, mushy fruit; there is no shortcut to the three hours.
- Choose an apple with pectin and acidThe jelly sets on the fruit's own pectin, so use a firm tart variety — Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Sweet soft supermarket apples give a loose, cloudy result. Leave the skins on for extra pectin and colour if you do not mind them in the finished mould.
- Sugar is unspecifiedAlternate layers, as written, works out to roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar for a quart bowl of sliced apple. Lean lower with sweeter fruit, bearing in mind that the sugar helps the set as well as the sweetness.
- VesselA quart bowl means any ovenproof bowl or pudding basin of about a litre; a tapered basin turns out most cleanly. A saucer sits inside on the fruit as a follower, weighted with a scrubbed stone or a full jar, to keep the slices submerged and pressed into a single mass.
- Cold is part of the recipeDo not attempt to unmould while warm — the set is fragile until fully chilled. Leave it several hours or overnight, then run a thin knife round and invert.
- Water bath is optional but helpfulStanding the bowl in a roasting tin of hot water evens out the long bake and reduces the risk of scorched sugar at the sides.
- YieldAbout four modest servings. It is an accompaniment rather than a centrepiece, and it keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator.
The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributions by named housewives and sold for charity, the Toronto edition drawing on the earlier Chicago one, which is why so many entries carry a signature like Mrs. J. Thorney's rather than a house style. This one belongs to a family of nineteenth-century baked apple moulds — apple cheese or, in English cookery, an apple mould — that use no gelatine at all and depend entirely on the fruit's own pectin and a very long, very low oven. The suggested partners give away the period: blanc mange and rennet custard appear to have been common soft white puddings of the 1870s household, and a sharp, brightly coloured fruit mould was presumably the usual foil for them. Slow-oven dishes like this may well also have made practical use of a coal range's falling heat after the day's baking was done.