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Apple Puffs
Peel two fine medium apples, drop them into a pint boiling water with a tablespoon powdered sugar and boil for ten minutes. Take up and press through a fine sieve. Have a puff preparation. Add the strained apples to the preparation and proceed to cook exactly the same.
A cross-referenced entry of the kind that fills Filippini-era compendia: the apple purée is fully described, the "puff preparation" it flavours is not, because it appears elsewhere in the book. Read this as a flavouring instruction rather than a standalone method.
- The missing halfA "puff preparation" in books of this period is most often taken to be a sweet souffle-type base — a thick milk-and-flour or egg-yolk panada lightened with beaten whites, baked in buttered and sugared moulds — but the book's own base recipe is not reproduced here, so the identification is inference. Without that base in hand this entry cannot be executed as written; pair it with a plain sweet souffle base you already trust.
- The hinge: get the purée dryThe hinge: get the puree dry -- The apples are lifted out of the cooking water rather than sieved with it, but boiled apple pulp is still loose, and a slack puree can slacken a souffle base so it will not climb. If the sieved pulp looks wet, cook it down in a dry pan until it mounds on the spoon before folding it into anything.
- Which apples"Two fine medium apples" is roughly 12 oz peeled, giving something over a cup of puree. The apples go in whole, so ten minutes will at best soften a breaking variety such as Bramley or McIntosh; a firm apple like Granny Smith will need longer, or slicing first.
- A tablespoon of sugar is not sweeteningOne tablespoon in a pint of water barely registers, and most of it is poured off with the cooking liquid. The sweetness of the finished dish comes from the puff base; taste the purée and adjust there rather than here.
- Sieve"Press through a fine sieve" would in this period usually mean a hair or drum sieve worked with a wooden pestle ("mushroom"). A food mill on the fine plate does the same job in a fraction of the time; a blender does not — it aerates and thins the pulp.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction; temperature and timing have to come from whatever base recipe you use. Where such books say "moderate oven" it is usually read as about 350-375F, and small baked puffs are served the moment they leave the oven.
- YieldRoughly a cup or so of puree; how many the finished dish serves depends entirely on the base preparation used.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, built his cookbooks the way a professional kitchen is built: a small number of mother preparations, then dozens of one-line variations that say only what changes. This entry is one of those variations — the whole of it is "make the apple puree, add it to the puff, proceed as before" — and it assumes a reader who can find the base preparation elsewhere in the book. The apple puff itself belongs to a long European line of fruit-flavoured baked egg puddings, the omelette soufflée and its relatives, which appeared on American hotel menus in the nineteenth century as a light finish to a heavy meal. Apples were an obvious flavouring in a country that grew them everywhere and stored them all winter.