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French Apple Cream
Peel, core, and slice 6 large apples, add 1 cup of water, a pinch of cinnamon, and 3 tablespoonfuls of sugar. Boil and stir and strain it into a dish, cover with sugar, and glaze with a salamander. Serve cold, with custard or milk, and small fancy cakes or buns.
A very plain stewed-apple dish whose only complication is the salamander, a tool no modern kitchen has. Everything else is straightforward stovetop work.
- The salamanderA salamander was a thick iron disc or plate on a long handle, heated red-hot in the fire and held just above a sugared surface to caramelise it. A kitchen blowtorch does the same job; a broiler set high with the dish close to the element is the second-best option, though it warms the fruit through.
- Serve cold means glaze firstGlaze the sugar while the pur hen.. A caramel crust set over moist fruit softens as it stands, so it is better set before the dish goes into the refrigerator, and the dish is best eaten the same day.
- Straining"Strain it into a dish" means pushing the cooked apple through a sieve to a smooth purée, not draining off the liquid. A food mill or fine sieve does it; a blender gives a slacker, paler result.
- ApplesSix large apples is roughly 2.5 to 3 lb. A variety that collapses when cooked, such as Bramley or McIntosh, saves work at the sieve. Firm supermarket varieties will need longer than the recipe implies.
- SugarThree tablespoons for three pounds of fruit is barely sweet by modern taste, and the recipe assumes cooking apples. Taste the purée after straining and adjust before it goes into the dish, since the covering of sugar is for the glaze rather than for sweetening.
- Boil and stirReckon on 15 to 25 minutes covered, uncovering at the end to drive off excess liquid. The purée should mound on a spoon; a wet one will not hold a caramel crust.
- YieldServes four to six as written. The custard the original suggests is a pouring custard, not a set one.
The name follows an old English convention in which "cream" was often used for any smooth, sieved, spoonable dish rather than strictly for something containing dairy, though many period dishes called creams did include it. The glaze itself is the point: caramelising sugar with a red-hot iron was standard finishing work in nineteenth-century kitchens, applied to everything from sugared pastry to browned gratins, and the tool survived in professional use long after domestic ranges gave way to gas. Dishes like this one have obvious appeal and a presentation that reads as more elaborate than the labour involved.