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Baked Apples
Wipe and core eight tart apples; arrange them in a granite dripping pan. Fill cavities with sugar and drop one-fourth teaspoon butter on top of each, sprinkle with cinnamon, sprinkle round onehalf cup sugar and pour on one cup cold water. Bake in a slow oven until soft, basting often with syrup in pan. Dispose on serving dish and sprinkle with granulated sugar.
A straightforward baked apple, but the original assumes a slow oven and frequent basting, which is what gives the fruit its glaze.
- Oven temperatureA "slow oven" here is about 300-325F. Higher heat splits the skins before the flesh softens, and the pan syrup scorches.
- Granite dripping panGranite ware is speckled enamel over steel — a shallow roasting pan. Any non-reactive shallow pan works; avoid bare aluminum, which the apple acid will pit and discolor.
- Choose the apple"Tart" means sour; the cooking apples usually sold for baking at the time were also firm enough to hold their shape. Rome Beauty, Northern Spy, Braeburn or Granny Smith all work as modern stand-ins; softer dessert apples collapse into sauce.
- Score before bakingRunning a shallow cut around the equator of each apple helps keep the skin from bursting during the long bake. Not in the original, but a useful precaution.
- Butter quantityA quarter teaspoon per apple is 2 teaspoons in all — deliberately restrained. A scant teaspoon each gives a richer syrup if you want one.
- TimingThe recipe gives none. Expect 45 to 70 minutes depending on size and variety; test with a skewer at the thickest part, which should meet no resistance.
- BastingBaste every 15 minutes or so. The half cup of sugar and one cup water reduce to a thin syrup, and repeated basting is what lacquers the skins.
- YieldEight apples, one per person. Best warm rather than hot, with cream or a spoonful of the pan syrup.
Baked apples belong to the oldest layer of English and American home cooking — fruit set in the cooling bread oven after the loaves came out, a practice often said to lie behind the "slow oven" of recipes like this one. Apples were the one fruit an ordinary household could still count on in midwinter, kept in barrels or a cool cellar since the autumn picking, and long-keeping tart varieties like Baldwin, Rhode Island Greening and Northern Spy were grown as much for storage as for flavor. A dessert that could go into the oven alongside or after the roast, then be left largely alone, earned its place on that basis.