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Apricot Custard
(Vienna.) Strain and make a pulp of 1/2 pint of stewed apricots. Mash these through a sieve, add 6 ounces of sugar and the juice of 1/2 an orange, cook and stir until thick, then add the whites of 4 eggs well beaten, pour into a dish, dust with sugar, bake 20 minutes in hot oven, and serve at once, with wine sauce or cream.
Despite the name, this is a baked apricot meringue rather than a custard — there are no yolks and no dairy in it. It rises in the oven and begins to sink the moment it leaves, which shapes almost every decision.
- Fold the whites into cooled pulpThe recipe says only to add the whites once the purée is thick, but letting the cooked purée come down to barely warm first helps the whites keep their volume. Fold in thirds with a spatula, stopping while a few streaks remain.
- "Hot oven"Read it as roughly 400-425F. Lower in that range gives a more even rise; higher and the top is likely to colour and set before the middle has puffed.
- Half a pint of stewed apricotsOne cup of drained stewed fruit, which after sieving gives roughly three-quarters of a cup of thick pulp. Dried apricots stewed until soft work well; canned halves in syrup will also do, with the sugar adjusted.
- Six ounces of sugarAbout three-quarters of a cup. It is a great deal for a cup of pulp; if your apricots are canned in syrup, cut it to four ounces or the finished dish is cloying and the meringue over-sweet.
- "Cook and stir until thick"You are driving off water so the purée will hold the whites. It should mound on the spoon and pull away from the pan bottom — five to ten minutes over medium heat, stirring constantly, as sweetened fruit scorches quickly.
- Beating the whites"Well beaten" here means firm peaks, not the stiff dry stage. Overbeaten whites break into grains and will not fold in cleanly. A pinch of salt or a few drops of lemon juice helps them hold.
- The dishA buttered and sugared straight-sided baking dish, allowing at least a quart and a half; four beaten whites folded into the purée make a good deal of volume, so fill no more than two-thirds.
- Twenty minutes, and serve at onceThat is not a caution about undercooking but about collapse — the centre should still be slightly moist. Carry it straight from the oven to the table with the sauce alongside.
- YieldFour modest servings. A wine sauce of the period might be a warm sabayon-style sauce of egg yolks, sugar and sweet white wine, or a simpler sweetened wine sauce thickened with butter or flour; unsweetened cream, lightly whipped, does the same job of cutting the sugar.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre popular around the turn of the twentieth century: the traveller's collection, in which recipes are gathered city by city and served to American readers as souvenirs of Europe. The "(Vienna.)" tag is doing real work — apricots are the fruit most closely bound up with Austrian cooking, grown along the Danube in the Wachau and known there as Marillen, and they turn up in dumplings, jams and brandy as well as in puddings like this one. The dish itself sits in a well-populated Central European family of baked sweet soufflés built on beaten whites and a little fruit. That it is called a custard may tell us something about English-language menu vocabulary of the period, though the word normally implied eggs and milk.