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November 29
Menu: Mock Bisque Soup; Mutton Haricot; String Beans; Fried Parsnips; Lettuce and Pepper Salad; Apples with Red Currant Jelly; Coffee Apples with Red Currant Jelly-6 cooking apples, 4 tablespoons flour, 1 egg, cakecrumbs, apricot jam, 6 glace cherries, red currant jelly, Crisco and syrup. Choose apples as much as possible same size, peel and core them carefully, so as not to break them. Put 1 cup syrup into stewpan or baking tin, put in apples and cook over fire or in oven until nearly done. Baste them occasionally with syrup. Let them get cold, then roll them in flour, brush over with beaten egg, toss in sifted cakecrumbs, and fry in hot Crisco a golden brown. Drain on piece of paper, fill centers with apricot jam, cut out some rounds of red currant jelly, place 1 on top of each apple and a glace cherry on that. Dish up and serve hot or cold. An apricot syrup should be sent to table separately with apples.
A fried whole-apple dessert built like a pastry chef's plated sweet, from the promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble issued for its new vegetable shortening. Most of the work is in the poaching and the breading; the assembly is decoration.
- The hinge: poach only to nearly doneApples cooked through will collapse the moment they hit the frying fat, and the breading will slide off. Stop while a skewer meets resistance in the middle, then chill them completely so the flesh firms before coating.
- "Syrup"An unqualified syrup here means a sugar syrup, boiled to dissolve; a light one, of the order of one part sugar to two of water, suits poaching. The cup of it in the pan is a poaching liquid, not a glaze. The recipe does not say what the separate apricot syrup was made from; thinned and strained apricot jam is the obvious reading.
- Crisco and frying temperatureAny neutral solid or liquid shortening works; use enough to come at least halfway up the apples. Bring it to 350–375°F. Cooler and the crumb coat drinks fat, hotter and it colours before the apple is warmed through.
- CakecrumbsDried plain sponge or pound cake, crushed and sifted, rather than fresh crumbs, which clump. Breadcrumbs would read savoury here. Stale cake dried in a low oven and rolled fine is the likely intention. Cake crumbs contain sugar, so they brown fast.
- Oven settingThe recipe says only "in oven" and gives no heat. If you poach in a baking tin rather than on the stove, a moderate heat, somewhere around 325-350F, will do, loosely covered, with the basting the recipe already calls for.
- One egg may not stretchSix large apples need more wash than a single beaten egg gives once it starts to thicken with flour. Have a second egg ready, loosened with a teaspoon of water.
- Rounds of jellyThis only works with a firm-set commercial or home-made red currant jelly, well chilled. Turn it out onto a plate, cut discs with the wide end of a piping tip or a small aspic cutter, and lift them with a wet palette knife. On a hot apple they will start to melt within a minute; the recipe allows serving cold, which avoids that.
- Apples to useChoose a variety that holds its shape, such as Braeburn or Golden Delicious. Avoid the soft cookers like Bramley, which will not stay whole through poaching and frying. A corer plus a small knife, working from both ends, keeps the walls intact.
- YieldSix apples, one per person, as a dessert.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, formerly cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, to persuade cooks to adopt Procter & Gamble's hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, introduced in 1911, in place of butter and lard. Its "Calendar of Dinners" assigns a full menu to every day of the year, which is why this dish carries the date November 30 rather than a chapter heading. The recipe itself is older than the fat it advertises: whole poached apples, crumbed and fried, then filled with jam and crowned with jelly and a glacé cherry, belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian repertoire of dressed fruit desserts, in which red currant jelly and glacé cherries were familiar store-cupboard items. Frying was a good argument for the new product - shortening kept better and took higher heat than butter without browning or burning, and the book leans hard on that advantage throughout.