Remove the core and scrape out the inside of the apples. Mix the scraped apple with chopped raisins, nuts, cinnamon, sugar and grated lemon peel. Fill the apples; place in a stew-pan. Mix ½ cup of wine with ½ cup of water. Sweeten with 3 tablespoonfuls of sugar and pour over the apples. Let cook slowly until the apples are tender. Remove from the fire; put on a glass dish. Pour over the sauce and serve cold.
A stovetop baked-apple, poached rather than roasted, and one of the simpler entries in the book — but the original assumes you know how many apples you are working with and how far to hollow them.
- QuantityNo number of apples is given. The "BD cup wine and "BD cup water with 3 tablespoons sugar is about enough for four medium apples in a snug pan; expect it to come only part of the way up the fruit, and scale it up if you are cooking more.
- Hollowing the fruitCore from the stem end and scrape the flesh out with a melon baller or a narrow teaspoon, leaving a shell roughly ¼ inch thick and the base intact. Break through the bottom and the filling leaks into the syrup.
- Choose a firm appleBraeburn, Granny Smith, Boskoop or another cooking apple that holds its shape. Softer eating apples collapse into the syrup before the filling has warmed through.
- Stew-panA wide, shallow, lidded saucepan or sauté pan — the apples should stand upright in a single layer without touching. A deep stockpot steams them unevenly.
- The wineThe recipe says only "wine"; a dry or off-dry white keeps the syrup pale, a light red gives a rosy one. Any table wine works, though some alcohol will remain after a covered simmer.
- Cooking time"Slowly until tender" is 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer, covered, depending on size and variety. Test with a skewer at the shoulder of the apple, not the rim. Baste once or twice.
- Reducing the sauceLift the apples out first, then boil the poaching liquid down by half to a light syrup before pouring it over. The original does not say to do this, but the liquid is thin as it stands.
- ServingServed cold, as written, from a glass dish so the syrup shows. Whipped cream or vanilla sauce suits it, though the recipe calls for neither. One apple per person.
Filled and stewed apples — gefüllte Äpfel — belong to the plain end of Viennese home cooking rather than the coffee-house pastry tradition the city is better known for, and the filling here is much the same mixture used for apple strudel: raisins, nuts, cinnamon, sugar and lemon zest. Poaching in sweetened wine on the stovetop was one common alternative to baking, though which method came first is not something this recipe settles. Books arranged as a dish a day from a different country — as this one is, with a French pie on the 27th and Scotch tripe on the 29th — offered American home cooks a manageable dose of the foreign without unfamiliar ingredients; an Austrian apple dessert made from apples, raisins and nuts fit that brief exactly.