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Apples En Casserole
(Provincial France.) Peel and core 4 large apples, put them in an earthen dish with 1 wineglassful of brandy, juice of a lemon, a little cinnamon, and 1 cup of sugar. Cover closely, and bake in the oven for 3/4 hour. Cover with sugar and chopped nuts, glaze with a salamander, serve with a pitcher of rich milk.
A very short recipe that assumes a covered earthenware pot and a hot iron for finishing. Both have modern equivalents, and the sugar is worth rethinking.
- "En casserole" means the potIn this period a casserole is a lidded earthenware or enamelled vessel used on the stove or in the oven, not a baked layered dish. A small Dutch oven or a covered ceramic baker with a tight lid does the job; the seal matters more than the material, since the apples cook in their own steam plus the brandy and lemon.
- WineglassfulAround 2 fl oz, or a quarter cup. Nineteenth-century wineglasses were far smaller than modern stemware, so do not pour to the rim of what is in your cupboard.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; ovens of the period were judged by hand rather than by thermostat. Three-quarters of an hour for whole peeled apples suggests a moderate oven, around 350F. Test with a skewer at 35 minutes; thin-fleshed apples collapse well before the stated time.
- A cup of sugar is a period quantityOne cup for four apples produces a heavy syrup, in keeping with turn-of-the-century dessert sweetness. Half that gives a sauce that still glazes and lets the lemon and brandy read.
- Choose apples that holdWhole cored apples baked 45 minutes need a firm variety: Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Bramley if you want them to slump deliberately. Softer supermarket eating apples will burst before the syrup thickens.
- The salamanderA salamander was a flat iron disc on a handle, heated in the fire and held over sugar to caramelise it from above. A broiler set high, or a kitchen blowtorch, does the same thing. Watch it: the chopped nuts scorch faster than the sugar browns.
- "Rich milk"At this date milk was not homogenised, and "rich" indicates whole, un-skimmed milk with the cream still in it. Pour cream, half-and-half, or thin custard instead.
- YieldFour apples, four servings, best served warm while the syrup is still loose enough to spoon over.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre popular in America around 1900: collections of "foreign" dishes gathered by travellers and offered to home cooks as a form of armchair tourism, each recipe labelled with its country or province. The tag "(Provincial France.)" is doing that work here, promising rustic authenticity rather than Parisian restaurant polish, and the earthen dish and the pitcher of milk are part of the same picture. The dish itself is unremarkable in France, where baked apples with spirits, sugar and lemon are standard household cooking, and brandy in an apple dessert points naturally toward the cider and eau-de-vie country of Normandy and Brittany, though the book names no region more precisely. What may date the recipe most is the salamander: it is often said that by this period the tool was fading from domestic kitchens and surviving mainly in professional ones, and one might read its casual mention as assuming a reader with some acquaintance with more formal cookery.