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Apple Sauce
1 pound apples, 2 tablespoons sugar, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup water, and strained juice of 1/2 lemon. Peel, core, and slice apples, put them into saucepan with sugar, Crisco, water, lemon juice, and cook them until tender. Serve with roast duck.
A plain stovetop apple sauce, distinguished only by the fat stirred into it — a reminder that this book was written to sell shortening. Everything here works as written; the notes are about proportions and choices the original leaves open.
- One pound of applesThat is roughly three medium apples, yielding about 1 1/2 cups of sauce — enough for four as an accompaniment. Weigh before peeling; the recipe assumes market weight.
- The CriscoTwo tablespoons of hydrogenated vegetable shortening is here purely as product placement. Butter gives the same richness and better flavour, and plain omission costs you nothing but gloss.
- Apple choice decides the textureThe recipe says nothing about variety, and it matters more than anything else in it. Bramley, McIntosh or similar soft-fleshed cookers collapse into sauce in 15-20 minutes; Granny Smith or Honeycrisp hold their slices and want mashing at the end.
- Sugar is a starting pointTwo tablespoons to a pound is a lightly sweetened sauce, appropriate to a savoury pairing. Taste when the apples are soft and adjust — early-season cookers may need double.
- Water and the lidThe recipe says nothing about covering the pan. Half a cup should keep things from catching over low heat if the pan is covered; uncovered, much of it may boil off before the fruit softens. If the finished sauce is loose, drive off the excess over higher heat for a minute or two.
- Smooth or chunkyThe instruction stops at "tender." Period sauces were commonly beaten smooth with a spoon or pressed through a sieve; either treatment is consistent with the text, which leaves the point open.
- Filed under EggsThe heading has no bearing on the dish; the sauce belongs to the duck it is served with.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of a series of cookbooks commissioned to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the fat turns up in places no cook would otherwise have put it — including, as here, a pan of stewed apples. The pairing of apple sauce with duck and goose is much older and entirely traditional across northern Europe: the acidity cuts the fat of the bird, which is why the lemon juice is worth keeping even when the sugar is reduced. English cookery books had been printing apple sauce for roast pork and goose since the eighteenth century, generally with nothing but apples, water and a little butter, so this version is the standard formula with a sponsor's ingredient folded in.