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Baked Apples, Creole Style
Cook the apples in a little water and lemon juice. Place in a dish and fill the centers with jelly or marmalade, pouring the liquid in the baking pan over them. On the top of each apple place a meringue, pressing it through a tube. Put the apples in a moderate oven for about eight minutes. Serve very cold.
The original assumes you know how to poach an apple and pipe a meringue; what it gives you is the assembly. Two things need filling in: the apples must be fully tender before the meringue goes on, and the oven stage is only for colour.
- The hinge: cook the apples firstEight minutes in the oven will set and tint a meringue, nothing more. The apples must be soft all the way through from the initial poaching, or you will serve raw fruit under a browned cap.
- Preparing the applesCore them but leave them whole and unpeeled, or peel only the top third so they hold their shape. Firm baking varieties — Rome, Braeburn, Golden Delicious — stay upright; Macintosh and similar collapse into sauce.
- "A little water and lemon juice"About half a cup of water and the juice of half a lemon for six apples, in a covered pan, either on the stovetop or in the oven. The liquid should reduce to a few spoonfuls of syrup, which is what gets poured over at the end.
- "A moderate oven"350F. At that heat the meringue tips take colour in roughly eight to ten minutes. A hotter oven browns the peaks before the interior sets and encourages weeping.
- The meringueNot specified in the original. Two egg whites beaten stiff with four tablespoons of caster sugar will cover six apples. Pressing it through a tube means a piping bag fitted with a tube; the original does not say which shape, though a star tip is the usual choice. A spoon-swirled cap will also serve.
- Jelly or marmaladeCurrant jelly, quince, or a bitter orange marmalade all suit. Fill the cored centres after the apples have cooked and cooled a little, so the jelly does not simply boil out.
- "Serve very cold"Meringue softens and beads with syrup after several hours in the refrigerator. Chill the poached, filled apples thoroughly, then meringue and bake shortly before serving and cool them only to room temperature or briefly chilled.
- YieldOne apple per person; the method scales to whatever fits in a single layer in the pan.
"Creole style" in American cookbooks of this period often functioned less as a precise New Orleans recipe than as a general signal for the sweet, fruit-and-citrus manner associated with Louisiana and the French Caribbean. What is genuinely of its moment here is the meringue pressed through a tube. Pastry bags and metal tubes are generally thought to have become common household equipment over the course of the later nineteenth century, and compilers like this one delighted in applying the confectioner's finish to homely material. A baked apple, put up with piped whites and served cold, is a domestic version of a restaurant entremets.