Apple Rings
Pare, core and cut apples that are not too sour, in rings one-half inch thick. Sprinkle them with lemon juice. Make a syrup by Fifth Sunday cooking one cup sugar with one cup water, ten minutes. Drop in three or four Cassia buds or pieces of stick cinnamon. Cook three or four apple rings at a time in syrup until soft, turning often to preserve their shape. Drain and arrange them around roast loin of pork. The syrup may be used for stewing apples or prunes.
A simple stovetop poach that turns hard apples into a glossy garnish for roast pork. The whole thing hinges on choosing an apple that holds its shape and cooking only a few rings at a time so the syrup stays hot and the slices stay flat.
- The stray words in the text"by Fifth Sunday" appears to be a typesetting intrusion from elsewhere on the page. Read it as "Make a syrup by cooking one cup sugar with one cup water, ten minutes."
- Which apples"not too sour" points to an apple that will not collapse in the syrup, though sourness and firmness are not the same thing. Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Gala or Honeycrisp hold their rings; Bramley and most McIntosh types will fall apart in the syrup.
- Cassia budsThe dried immature fruits (loosely called buds) of the cassia tree, once a familiar pickling spice in American kitchens and now sold mainly by specialty spice merchants. The recipe gives its own substitute: three or four pieces of stick cinnamon. Ground cinnamon will only cloud the syrup.
- The lemon juiceIt is there to stop the cut rings browning while you get the syrup going, not for flavour. Toss the rings in it as you cut them rather than sprinkling at the end.
- Syrup and timingEqual parts sugar and water boiled ten minutes gives a light syrup. Keep it at a bare simmer once the apples go in; a hard boil breaks the rings apart before they soften.
- Cooking in batchesThree or four rings at a time is not fussiness — crowding drops the temperature and the slices steam into mush. Allow roughly 4 to 8 minutes a batch depending on thickness and variety, turning once or twice, and lift them out while they still have some resistance at the centre.
- Draining and holdingDrain on a rack, not on paper, or the syrup glues them down. They can be poached several hours ahead and warmed briefly in the syrup before serving.
- YieldOne cup of syrup will handle about three medium apples, giving somewhere around a dozen to eighteen rings.
- The leftover syrupStrain out the spice before reusing it for stewed prunes or apples.
Sweet fruit set against roast pork is one of the oldest fixed pairings in English and American cooking, and by the early twentieth century the applesauce bowl was often joined on the platter by garnishes that could be arranged there without apologies — spiced crab apples, glazed apple rings, brandied peaches. 52 Sunday Dinners belongs to that moment when the Sunday roast was expected to look composed as well as taste good. Cassia buds help date the recipe: they were a common grocery-shelf spice in America into the 1920s, used for pickles, spiced fruit and mincemeat, and they largely disappeared from ordinary kitchens after that, leaving cinnamon stick to do the same job.