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Apple Balls
(Germany.) Peel and chop 5 large apples, add 1 ounce butter, 3 ounces of sugar, and rind and juice of a lemon. Cook and stir until smooth, add yolks of 3 eggs, and 2 teaspoonfuls of cornstarch. Cook 20 minutes, press through a sieve, and let it cool. Make into balls, dip in egg and crumbs, fry brown in a kettle of boiling lard. Put a bit of angelica or citron in the end of each to imitate a stalk, dust with sugar, arrange on a dish, and serve cold with a white sauce. PEARS (as cooked in Roumania.).
Peel, slice, and core 8 large pears. Add 1 roll, sliced thin, toasted and crushed to powder, 2 crushed cloves, and 3 pints of water. Cook for 1 hour, covered, press through a sieve, add 2 ounces of sugar, the juice of a lemon, and 1 glass of white wine. Cook 20 minutes more, set on ice, serve with cream and sponge cakes.
Two fruit desserts run together in one entry: a German fried apple croquette and a Romanian spiced pear purée. Both depend on cooking the fruit down until it is genuinely stiff, and the apple balls will not hold together otherwise.
- The hinge: the paste must be cold and firmThe apple mixture has to reduce to a thick, mounding paste — closer to marmalade than applesauce — then chill several hours until it can be rolled without slumping. If it is at all loose the balls will burst in the fat. Refrigerating overnight, and even freezing the shaped balls briefly before breading, is the safest route.
- Weights1 ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; 3 ounces sugar is a scant half cup. Five large apples is roughly 2 to 2 1/4 lb — use a firm cooking apple that breaks down cleanly, such as Bramley or Granny Smith.
- "Cook 20 minutes" after the yolksThis is a slow stovetop custard-thickening over low heat with constant stirring, not a boil. The yolks will curdle if rushed; a heavy pan and a heat diffuser help. Twenty minutes brings the yolks well past a safe temperature.
- Frying fat"A kettle of boiling lard" means a deep pan of fat at 350-360F. Lard is still excellent here, but any neutral high-smoke-point oil works. Fry only a few balls at a time so the temperature does not crash.
- Angelica and citronCandied angelica stem is now a specialty item; candied citron peel or a strip of candied lemon peel does the same job. Both are decoration only, pressed in after frying to suggest a stalk.
- "White sauce"In a sweet context of this period this is most likely a sweet sauce rather than the savoury flour-and-milk kind: a thin vanilla custard, a sweetened milk sauce, or a wine sauce. Serve it cold, as directed.
- "1 roll" in the pear recipeA plain white bread roll, sliced, toasted dry and crushed for what is effectively a chilled fruit soup. Around 2 oz of crumbs, roughly half a cup, is the right order of magnitude.
- "1 glass of white wine"Read as somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 cup; a period wineglass was commonly reckoned at 2 fl oz. Since the wine goes in before a further 20 minutes of cooking, some of the alcohol will cook off, though not all of it.
- YieldThe apple mixture makes roughly 12 to 16 walnut-sized balls, serving four to six. The pear dish, with 3 pints of water reduced, serves six as a chilled soup or spooned dessert.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre of "foreign cookery" collections, in which an American or British compiler gathered dishes country by country — hence the parenthetical labels, (Germany.) and (as cooked in Roumania.), which functioned as the whole of the provenance. The apple balls are a version of the fried sweet croquette found across German-speaking Europe, where thick fruit or semolina pastes were breaded and deep-fried; the little stalk of candied angelica is pure Victorian confectionery convention, a garnish used to make moulded sweets resemble the fruit they were made from. The pear dish is closer to the bread-thickened fruit soups common through Central and Eastern Europe, where stale rolls did the work that cornstarch or cream would do elsewhere — a habit of frugality that survived into printed cookbooks long after it stopped being a necessity. Neither recipe gives a source or a cook's name, which was typical: such books traded on the romance of travel rather than on documentation.