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Spiced Apple Sauce
Wipe, pare and core six or eight tart apples. Place them in sauce-pan, add just enough water to prevent burning; add three or four cloves and half a dozen Cassia buds. Cook to a mush. Pass through a sieve; return to sauce-pan, add three-fourths cup sugar and cook five minutes, stirring constantly. Cool and serve.
A plain stovetop apple sauce with a spice note that has largely disappeared from American pantries. Nothing here is difficult; the only real decisions are the apple and how much water you add.
- Cassia budsThese are the dried unopened flower buds of the cassia tree, sold through spice merchants and Chinese grocers rather than supermarkets. They taste like a milder, sweeter cinnamon. If you cannot find them, a two-inch piece of cassia or cinnamon bark, removed before sieving, is the closest substitute.
- "Just enough water"Practically speaking, a quarter cup for six to eight apples. Tart apples release a good deal of liquid as they collapse; too much water at the start gives you a thin sauce you then have to cook down.
- The applesTart cooking apples of the period included Greening, Baldwin and Winesap. Granny Smith, McIntosh or Cortland will all serve; McIntosh and Cortland collapse most readily. Six to eight apples is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb.
- Cook to a mushCover the pan and keep the heat low, 20 to 30 minutes depending on the variety, stirring once or twice. The lid matters more than the clock.
- Passing through a sieveThe point is to catch the cloves and bud stems along with any fibrous bits. A food mill does it faster than a sieve and a spoon. Fish the whole spices out first if you would rather not chase them.
- The sugarThree-fourths cup is generous by current taste, and the older varieties were often sharper than most supermarket fruit. Start with a third of it, taste, and add from there. The five minutes of constant stirring is only to dissolve the sugar and stop scorching on the pan bottom.
- Yield and servingAbout three cups, enough for six as a side dish. Served cool, as the recipe directs, it was a common accompaniment to pork or goose. It keeps about a week refrigerated.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a run of turn-of-the-century American menu books that planned a year's worth of Sunday dinners. Cassia buds date the recipe more precisely than anything else in it: they were a common item in nineteenth-century American spice boxes, listed in grocers' catalogues alongside allspice and mace, and were used in pickling and preserving as well as in sauces. They faded from general use in the twentieth century as ground cinnamon took over, which is why a modern cook reads the ingredient and pauses. The pairing of sharp apple with pork is older than any cookbook and generally traced to northern European practice, where both were autumn products of the same farmyard.