Home › The World's Kitchen › Chartreuse De Pommes
Chartreuse De Pommes
Neatly peel eight sound apples, and with the aid of a thin tube cut out as many strips as you can. Trim the strips so as to have them of equal size. Place them on a dish until required. Place all residue of the apples in a small saucepan with four ounces sugar, one teaspoon of vanilla essence, a half teaspoon ground cinnamon and one gill water. Cover the pan and slowly cook for thirty minutes. Remove from fire, press through a sieve into a bowl and let cool off.
Have three small saucepans on a table, place three ounces sugar and a half pint water in each pan, then squeeze the juice of a small, sound lemon in one pan only. Add one saltspoon ground Spanish saffron to another pan, and a saltspoon of cochineal in the third pan; set them on the fire, and, as soon as all come to a boil add the apple strips to the pans, evenly divided, and cook for five minutes. Remove from the fire and let cool off. Lightly wet a plain charlotte mould, line the bottom and sides with the apple strips, then fill up the mould with the apple puree. Turn on a dish, then let stand for five minutes with the mould on the charlotte. Lift up the mould and serve.
A moulded apple dessert that depends entirely on the purée being stiff enough to hold a shape, since there is no gelatine in it. Everything else is cutting and colouring.
- The hinge: reduce the puréeOnce sieved, the apple pulp must be thick enough to stand in a spoon, or the chartreuse will slump the moment the mould comes off. If it looks at all loose, return it to the pan and cook it down over low heat, stirring, until it mounds; then chill it thoroughly before filling.
- A gillA quarter of a pint: four fluid ounces (half a cup) by American measure, five fluid ounces by British. The four ounces of sugar for the purée is a weight, a scant two-thirds of a cup.
- A saltspoonRoughly a quarter teaspoon. For saffron that is a very large amount by modern prices; a good pinch of threads, crushed and steeped in the hot syrup, gives the same yellow.
- The thin tubeAn apple corer or column cutter, used to bore cylinders from the peeled fruit which are then split lengthwise into strips. A channel knife or a mandoline gives a more even result and wastes less.
- CochinealSold in the period as a red liquid colouring made from dried scale insects. Carmine is still available and still insect-derived; any red food colouring will serve, and vegetarian cooks should note the distinction.
- The three syrupsThree ounces sugar to half a pint water in each pan. The lemon pan is not a flavour so much as a bleach, keeping that third of the strips pale against the yellow and red.
- Cook the strips gentlyFive minutes at a bare simmer is right; a hard boil will collapse them into sauce. Firm apples such as Braeburn or Boskoop hold up far better than Bramley or McIntosh, which break down almost at once.
- Lining the mouldLay the strips in alternating colours against a lightly wetted mould, overlapping slightly, and press them flat. Chill the lined mould before filling so the pattern does not shift.
- Turning out and yieldThe five minutes with the inverted mould still in place lets the chartreuse settle onto the dish before it is lifted away. A standard charlotte mould should give roughly six to eight servings; cream or a thin apricot sauce suits it, though the recipe specifies no accompaniment.
A chartreuse in French cookery is a moulded dish lined with a decorative arrangement of vegetables or fruit and filled with a forcemeat or purée, and the name is generally traced to the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, whose rule excluded meat and whose supposed vegetable cookery lent the word to any dish that hides its filling behind a pattern of produce. By the nineteenth century the term had drifted well away from any monastic austerity, and in the grand kitchens of Carême's successors a chartreuse was among the more laborious showpieces of the cold table. This apple version belongs to that tradition at its most domestic: the trimmings and cores that would otherwise be discarded become the filling, while the tidy cut strips, dyed in three pans of coloured syrup, do the decorative work. The reliance on saffron and cochineal for colour is characteristic of the period, before coal-tar dyes were fully accepted in food, and the whole exercise says a good deal about a kitchen with enough labour on hand to bore cylinders out of eight apples for the sake of a striped exterior.