Home › The World's Kitchen › Apple Sauce
Apple Sauce
Core, peel and cut into thin pieces four good-sized green, sound apples. Place them in a small saucepan with two ounces sugar, one saltspoon salt, one saltspoon powdered cinnamon and half gill water; cover the pan, place it on the fire, briskly stir with a wooden spoon and mash very fine. Cook for twenty minutes, strain through a colander, let cool off and serve in a saucebowl separately.
DOUCETTE SALAD, "CORN MACHE PETTICUS" Procure a quart fine, fresh, green doucette (corn salad). Carefully pick off all stale leaves, if any adhering. Neatly pare the roots. Plunge it into plenty of cold water and let it float for ten minutes; turn it over with the hands and gently shake it two or three times meanwhile. Change the water and see that no sand remains at the bottom of the vessel. Replunge it in cold water, gently turn it over in all directions for two minutes, change the water; repeat the same operation once more.
Lift it up with the hands, let the water run out, place it in a clean cloth, drain carefully but thoroughly without mashing it. Gently loosen it with the hands, then place it in a salad bowl. Season with four tablespoons dressing. Mix well in a loose way and serve.
N. B. This salad being very delicate, it should never be seasoned except one minute before required. This delicious and wholesome article, I am sorry to say, is not sufficiently known in the United States.
Two short entries share the page: a stovetop apple sauce and a washing-and-dressing method for mâche. Both are plain cooking, but the measurements and one of the ingredient names need translating.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons of water — barely enough to keep the pan from catching, which is the point.
- Two ounces sugarThat is a weight, roughly a scant third of a cup of granulated sugar. Add it to taste once the fruit has broken down.
- "Green" applesProbably tart and firm rather than literally unripe — Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy would suit. Four good-sized apples is about 1½ to 2 lb before peeling and coring.
- Twenty minutes and the mashingThin slices with only 4 tablespoons of water will collapse well before twenty minutes on a strong flame. Cook covered on low, stir often, and judge by texture; the instruction to mash as it cooks matters more than the clock.
- StrainingPushing the sauce through a colander catches skin and lumps and evens out the texture. Skip it if you want a rough sauce, or use a food mill or sieve for a finer result with less work.
- Doucette is mâcheCorn salad, lamb's lettuce, Valerianella locusta — sold in many supermarkets now as mâche, often pre-washed in a bag. A quart of loose leaves is roughly 3 to 4 oz, enough for two or three.
- The three water changesMâche grows in low rosettes and holds grit at the base of the leaves. Sold loose with roots attached it genuinely needs the repeated soakings described; bagged mâche needs one rinse.
- Dress at the last minuteThe N.B. in the original is the hinge of the recipe: the leaves are delicate and wilt quickly once dressed, so toss with the four tablespoons of dressing as it goes to the table.
- YieldThe apple sauce makes about 2 cups, serving four alongside pork or goose. Serve it in a separate bowl as directed rather than plating it with the meat.
Filippini's book sets a French kitchen's habits in front of an American household, and this page shows the seam. The apple sauce is the standard European accompaniment to roast pork and goose, reduced here to its bones — fruit, sugar, salt, cinnamon, a splash of water — and served apart in a saucebowl in the French manner rather than spooned onto the plate. The salad entry is more revealing: doucette, corn salad, mâche or *petticus* is a cool-weather green long grown in France and Germany, where it was gathered from grain stubble, which is generally given as the source of the English name. Filippini's closing complaint that it "is not sufficiently known in the United States" was fair for his own day and stayed so for much of the century; mâche became widely available in American markets only with the rise of packaged salad greens, and the washing instructions here belong to an era when it arrived from the garden with its roots and half the field still attached.