The apple Florentine

At Potton in Bedfordshire and the places round about, some sixty years before Hone’s Year Book, every Christmas entertainment had an apple Florentine on the table, of which all the guests ate. It was a huge pewter dish filled to the brim with baking apples, sugar and lemon under a lid of rich pastry. When it was baked the crust was lifted off, cut into triangles and set back round the dish, and a full quart of hot spiced ale was poured in. The correspondent remembered a pewter dish on a kitchen dresser prized for having held the Florentine at thirty Christmases.