H.F.F. 6.4: Bread and Butter

 

The Challenge: Bread and Butter: Make bread, a dish with bread as an ingredient, or any food that is a staple of its cuisine.

The Recipe: Apple Charlotte from Mrs. Hale's New Cook Book.

An Apple Charlotte.-Pare and slice a quantity of apples, cut off the crust of a loaf, and cut slices of bread and butter. Butter the inside of a pie dish, and place bread and butter all round, then put in a layer of apples sprinkled with lemon peel chopped very fine, and a considerable quantity of good brown sugar. Then put on a layer of bread and butter, and another of apples lemon peel and sugar, until the dish is full, squeezing over the juice of lemons so that every part shall be equally flavored. Cover up the dish with the crusts of bread and the peels of the apples to prevent it from browning or burning, bake it an hour and a quarter, then take off the peels and the crust, and turn it out of the dish.

The Date/Year and Region: 1857, Philadelphia

How Did You Make It: Mostly as an assistant. Quin took the lead on this one, though I did peel apples, zest the lemon, and cut bread crusts. I'm writing it up anyway, because the dish turned out beautifully, and I want to save this receipt--and it used literal bread and butter as ingredients.

We started by coring, slicing, and peeling 3 pounds of apples (this ended up being more than needed, and 2 pounds would likely be closer to the mark). We then cut the crusts off of a whole loaf of pre-sliced brioche. Quinn experimented with placing the bread (in whole slices and/or half-triangles) in the bottom of a buttered pie tin, buttering each slice in turn, while I used a tin rasp to grate off the peel of a lemon. The eventual winning pattern was to overlay the brioche triangles, fanning them out in a circle around the bottom of the tin. Narrower pieces of bread filled in the sides. Over this went a layer of apple slices, and about half the lemon zest, and a generous sprinkle of sugar and cinnamon. Then another layer of bread, another layer of apples/lemon/sugar, and a final layer of bread, with a dash of lemon juice over the whole. We actually ran low on the bread, and ended up trimming the heels to fill out the middle layer of bread (preserving the crustless pieces for the exterior parts of the charlotte). 

The apple peels were heaped upon the dish, and the pan put into the oven of an 1850s wood-burning iron stove.

To serve, Quin removed the scorched peels, turned out the apple charlotte, and garnished with lemon-balm and apple slices. We also whipped some heavy cream, which made an excellent addition to this dish.

Time to Complete: Hard to say, with no clock in the kitchen, but I'd estimate 2-2.5 hours based on when we started and when we served.

Total Cost: $6 worth of apples and lemons, other ingredients provided by others

How Successful Was It?: The texture was light and pleasing, the flavor quite palatable. I'm often skeptical of bread-based puddings, but this one suffered none of the irregularities I dislike (soggy bread, weird texture changes), and I ended up taking seconds.

How Accurate Is It?: We used a modern apple variety and commercially prepared bread [though professional bakers were selling their wares in our area in 1857], but otherwise were about as close as we could get to the 1850 receipt. The tin was a reproduction piece, and the wood-burning stove we cooked on original to the period. The whipped cream was Quinn's idea, but with examples such as trifles, I don't think it's an inappropriate serving option--and we also whipped the cream by hand using a birch whisk in a redware bowl. Looking over the receipt again, the cinnamon was not specified, though I think it was a good addition.

Assembling the layers.

Arranging the peels.

The peels worked exactly as we hoped.

The apple charlotte turned out beautifully.