Baked Apples
Cut out the blossoms and stems of tart apples, in the stem end put some sugar; bake till soft; serve either warm or cold. Sweet apples require a longer time for baking than sour, and are better for adding a little water in pan when placed to bake. They require several hours, and when done are of a rich, dark brown color. If taken out too soon they are insipid. For an extra nice dish, pare and core tart apples, place in pan, put butter and sugar in cavity, and sprinkle cinnamon over them, and serve warm with cream or milk. Or, pare and quarter tart apples, put a layer in earthen baking-dish, add lumps of butter, and sprinkle with cinnamon, then a layer of apples, etc., till dish is full; bake till soft. Or, quarter and core sour apples without paring, put in baking-dish, sprinkle with sugar and bits of butter, add a little water, and bake until tender. The proportion of sugar is a gill, and butter half-size of an egg, to three pints of apples, and a gill and a half of water.
Four variations on one idea, with proportions given only at the end. Read the last sentence first: it applies to the quartered-apple versions and tells you how much sugar, butter and water to use.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal when ovens had no dial. Bake at 350-375F; the apples want to soften through without the skins bursting early.
- A gillHalf a cup. So the closing proportions are 1/2 cup sugar, about 2 tablespoons butter ("half-size of an egg" is roughly 1 oz) and 3/4 cup water to three pints of prepared apples.
- Three pints of applesMeasured by volume after quartering, which comes to roughly 1 1/2 lb, or about four to six medium apples. Enough for four to six servings.
- "Several hours" is for storage apples"Several hours" -- The book gives the long bake, and the "rich, dark brown color", to sweet apples. A modern whole cored apple is usually soft in 40 to 55 minutes; quartered pieces in 30 to 40. Judge by a knife going in with no resistance, not by the clock.
- Sweet versus sourThe distinction the book draws is real and still useful. Tart, firm varieties -- Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening -- hold their shape well and take the sugar. Softer sweet eating apples such as Gala or Red Delicious are more likely to go to mush. Note that the book's "insipid" refers to apples taken from the oven too soon, not to the variety.
- Cutting out the blossom and stemThis removes the ends and leaves a well in the stem end for the sugar without coring right through. Keep the cut shallow so the sugar does not run out into the pan.
- Earthen baking-dishAny ceramic, glass or enamelled dish. Avoid bare cast iron or aluminium, which react with the acid and can dull the flavour and colour.
- Water in the panThe book's own proportion is a gill and a half, about 3/4 cup, to three pints of apples; it keeps the fruit from scorching and gives a light syrup. Top it up if the pan runs dry before the apples give way.
Buckeye Cookery is generally traced to Ohio in the 1870s, a farming region where apples were the fruit you had all winter and the cellar bin dictated the menu. That explains the emphasis here on the difference between sweet and sour apples: a nineteenth-century household did not buy a named variety by the pound but used whatever the orchard yielded, and the cook had to know that a sweet apple bakes more slowly than a sour one. Baked apples were valued precisely because they asked almost nothing of the cook. The butter-and-cinnamon variations and the cream poured over at the table mark the "extra nice" version, a company dish rather than an everyday one.