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Apples for Apples with Rice
Neatly peel and core six medium apples. Place them in a saucepan and boil in two quarts of water with half stick vanilla and four ounces sugar for thirty minutes. Remove very carefully with a skimmer without breaking them and place upon the rice. Take up the vanilla bean and put it in sugar to keep for other purposes.
This is one half of a two-part dessert: the apples are poached separately and set onto a bed of sweetened rice made elsewhere in the book. Read it as a component, not a whole dish.
- The hinge: keep the water below a boilPeeled, cored apples held at a rolling boil for thirty minutes will collapse, which is exactly what the instruction to lift them out unbroken is warning against. Bring the syrup to a boil, then drop to a bare simmer and poach until a skewer slides in with slight resistance.
- Realistic timingThirty minutes suits a firm, dense cooking apple. Many modern dessert varieties will be tender well before that, and a firmer apple such as a Granny Smith will take longer. Test rather than time.
- The syrup is very thinFour ounces of sugar (about half a cup, 115 g) in two quarts of water is barely sweet, and fruit poached in so dilute a syrup tends to give up its own sugars and flavour to the liquid. A heavier syrup helps the apples hold their shape and their flavour.
- Half stick vanillaA whole vanilla bean, split lengthwise, so half a bean here. Split it before it goes in the pan; scraping the seeds out is unnecessary if the pod is going into the sugar jar afterwards.
- SkimmerA wide, flat perforated skimmer or a spider. A slotted spoon works, but support each apple from underneath rather than hooking it, or the cored centre tears.
- The vanilla sugar noteRinsing and drying the used pod before burying it in a jar of granulated sugar is sound practice and still worth doing. Dry it thoroughly or the sugar cakes.
- Yield and assemblySix apples serves six. Cook the rice first and keep it warm, since the apples should go onto it while still hot; dishes of this kind are often finished with a spoonful of warmed, sieved apricot jam brushed over each apple.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book (1906) out of the French professional repertoire he had worked in, and this is a plain rendering of pommes au riz — a bourgeois French dessert of rice simmered in sweetened, vanilla-scented milk, spread in a dish, and crowned with poached apple halves or whole cored apples. The form belongs to the same family as the grander riz à l'impératrice. The closing instruction about the vanilla bean is a small piece of period economy. Vanilla was expensive enough that a used pod was worth drying and stowing in the sugar canister, a habit that gave kitchens a standing supply of vanilla sugar.