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Baked Apples Stuffed with Figs
Select fine-flavored, tart apples, wipe, core and pare. Fill cavities with washed figs cut in pieces. Bake until tender in a hot oven, basting with hot sugar syrup. Serve cold with thick cream sweetened, and flavored with nutmeg.
A short recipe that assumes you know how to manage a syrup and a hot oven. The two things it leaves out are the syrup proportions and the fact that pared apples collapse faster than unpared ones.
- "Hot oven"The recipe gives no temperature; in period usage a hot oven is somewhere around 400-450F. Times will vary a good deal with size, so test with a skewer at the shoulder rather than going by the clock.
- Pared, not just coredThe recipe has you take the skin off, which leaves the apple with nothing holding it together. Bake them in a dish just large enough that they support each other, and stop as soon as a skewer slides in.
- The syrupNo proportions are given. A basic basting syrup is 1 cup sugar to 1 cup water, boiled two or three minutes; use it hot so it does not chill the oven. Baste every ten minutes and spoon the pan syrup over the apples again as they cool.
- FigsThe instruction to wash them suggests dried figs rather than fresh, though the recipe does not specify. Snip off the hard stem and cut into quarter-inch pieces. If they are very dry, a ten-minute soak in warm water or in some of the syrup keeps them from scorching.
- Choice of apple"fine-flavored, tart" and firm enough to hold shape: Bramley collapses, so prefer Northern Spy, Granny Smith, Braeburn or a good russet.
- Serve coldThis is meant as a cold dessert, and it will sit happily for a few hours as the syrup sets around the fruit. The cream is heavy cream, sweetened and flavoured with nutmeg; whether whipped or poured is left to you.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Count one apple per person and enough fig pieces to fill each cavity.
Baked apples stuffed with dried fruit were a standing autumn dessert in American households long before this book, and the pairing with figs says something about the period's grocery trade: by the 1900s dried figs from Smyrna and, increasingly, from California's new Fresno orchards were cheap, keepable and sold everywhere, so a plain baked apple could be dressed up from the pantry shelf rather than the fruit stall. 52 Sunday Dinners was organised as a year of menus, one for each Sunday, and the instructions here assume a syrup and an oven you already know how to judge. The fruit is served cold under sweetened cream with nutmeg.