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Cream of Apples
Peel and core four sound Newtown Pippin apples, cut in halves and finely slice them. Heat an ounce good butter in a sautoire, drop in apples, add ounce sugar, few drops vanilla essence and cook for ten minutes, tossing once in a while, being careful not to mash too much, remove and lay sautoire on table. Break two whole fresh eggs and two yolks into a bowl, add two ounces sugar, mix well with whisk for one minute, then pour in two gills milk, half gill cream, half teaspoon vanilla essence, and mix for two minutes. Place apples in a baking dish, strain preparation through cloth into dish, lightly mix, then set in oven with door open for twenty-five minutes, remove, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve.
A baked apple custard in the French style, written by a chef for cooks who already knew how custard behaves. The original gives no oven temperature, so that is the first thing to settle.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the instruction "door open" probably serves to bleed heat off so the custard sets gently. In a modern oven use 325F with the door closed, and check at 25 minutes for a custard that trembles at the centre but is not liquid.
- Gills and ouncesA gill is half a cup, so two gills milk is 1 cup and half a gill cream is 1/4 cup. The sugar and butter are weights: 1 oz butter is 2 tablespoons, 1 oz sugar about 2 tablespoons, 2 oz sugar about 1/4 cup.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow sauté pan. Any wide skillet works; the width matters because the apples should cook in a single layer rather than steam into sauce.
- Newtown PippinA firm, tart heirloom apple now sold mainly at orchards and farmers' markets. Golden Russet, Northern Spy or Granny Smith hold their slices the same way. Avoid McIntosh, which collapses in the ten minutes of frying.
- Straining through clothWorth doing rather than skipping. Passing the egg mixture through muslin or a fine sieve catches the chalazae and any set threads of yolk, which is what separates a smooth custard from a speckled one.
- Vanilla essenceRead as vanilla extract. The recipe uses it twice, in the apples and in the custard; a total of well under a teaspoon, which is restrained by modern habit.
- A water bath helpsThe original relies on an open door for gentle heat. Setting the baking dish in a roasting pan of hot water achieves the same thing more reliably and prevents the edges curdling before the middle sets.
- YieldFour apples and a custard of two whole eggs and two yolks fills a dish of roughly 1 quart and serves four generously. Best warm, within an hour or so of baking; the sugar dusting goes on at the last minute.
This is one of the plain French household desserts that Alexander Filippini gathered into The International Cook Book (1906) after decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York; the terse, verb-first style, the sautoire, the straining cloth and the measurements in gills and ounces all belong to the professional brigade rather than the domestic manual. The dish itself is essentially an apple version of the family of baked egg-and-milk sweets that runs from flan to clafoutis, with the fruit softened in butter and sugar first so it does not water down the custard. The choice of Newtown Pippin is a marker of place: raised on Long Island in the eighteenth century and long the standard American cooking and export apple, it was still what a New York chef would reach for in 1906, though it had largely dropped out of commercial orchards within two generations.