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Baked Apples and Rice Croquettes
(An English dessert.) Pare and core 4 fine apples, add 1 cup of water, 2 ounces sugary juice of a lemon, and some nutmeg to the skin and cores. Cook 1/2 hour, strain, add the apples, bake 1/2 hour, and put on a dish with alternate arrangement of rice croquettes and bits of jam.
A compact English apple dish: the peel and cores are simmered into a spiced syrup, the apples baked in it, and the whole plated with rice croquettes and jam. The method is sound, but the text assumes you already know how to make the croquettes.
- Read the syrup step firstThe trimmings do the work here. The water, sugar, lemon juice and nutmeg are simmered with the skins and cores for the half hour, then strained; only after that do the pared apples go in. Skipping the strain leaves you with fibrous peel in the dish.
- Weights and volumesTwo ounces of sugar is about a quarter cup granulated. One cup of water is standard. Use firm baking apples that hold shape rather than a sauce apple.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the recipe at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, works; baste once or twice with the syrup, and take the apples out when tender to a skewer but still standing.
- NutmegFreshly grated whole nutmeg gives the best result here; a quarter of a nutmeg over four apples is plenty. The recipe only says 'some nutmeg'.
- The croquettesThe recipe names rice croquettes but gives no method for them. They are thick sweetened rice cooked in milk, cooled firm, shaped, egg-and-crumbed, and fried; look to a separate rice croquette recipe and have them ready before the apples come out of the oven.
- Serving and yieldFour apples serve four. Arrange the apples and croquettes alternately around a warm dish with small spoonfuls of jam between, and pour the remaining syrup over the fruit at the table so the croquettes stay crisp.
Baked apples in a syrup made from their own peel and cores sit within a broader English habit of thrift in the pastry kitchen, where trimmings were simmered for flavour rather than thrown out. The rice croquette alongside is the more cosmopolitan element: sweetened rice cooked in milk, set firm, crumbed and fried, a preparation that appears widely in Anglo-American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century and is generally traced to French practice. The heading '(An English dessert.)' suggests a collection that labels dishes by nationality. The dish is composed as an alternating ring of fruit, fried croquette and jam.