Black Caps
Pare and core tart apples with apple-corer, fill the center with sugar, stick four cloves in the top of each, and bake in deep pieplates, with a little water.
A bare-bones baked apple, written for cooks who already knew what a baked apple looked like coming out of the oven. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the apple variety, and how much water counts as "a little."
- Oven temperatureBuckeye Cookery gives none here. Baked apples do best at 350-375F, which softens the flesh before the skins split. Reckon on 35-50 minutes depending on size and variety.
- "Tart apples"The nineteenth-century kitchen apple was firm and sharp, and the instruction still holds: choose something that holds its shape, such as Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy or Rome. Modern dessert apples like Gala or Red Delicious collapse into sauce.
- Deep pieplates"deep" here means a plate or dish with enough side to hold liquid. Any baking dish that holds the apples upright and close together works, and crowding them slightly helps them stay standing.
- "A little water"Enough to cover the bottom of the dish, about a quarter-inch. It steams the fruit and keeps the sugar syrup from scorching; top it up if it cooks dry.
- ClovesFour whole cloves per apple is assertive by current taste. Two is plenty, and they should be pulled out before eating. A strip of lemon peel or a pinch of cinnamon in the cavity is a period-appropriate substitute.
- SugarThe recipe specifies only sugar; brown sugar or maple gives a better syrup. A teaspoon of butter dropped on top of the sugar keeps the filling from drying out.
- ServingOne apple per person, served warm with the pan syrup spooned over and cream or milk alongside.
Baked apples belong to the plainest end of American nineteenth-century cookery: a fruit dessert requiring no crust, no eggs, no cream and almost no attention, made from the sort of apple barrel many households kept in the cellar through the winter. The name "Black Caps" is usually explained by the darkened tops of the baked fruit, though the clove cluster at the top of each apple has also been suggested; neither reading can be confirmed from the recipe itself. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio in the later 1870s from contributed receipts, is full of this kind of entry -- three lines, no oven temperature, no timing, on the fair assumption that a cook standing at her own range knew her own fire better than any book could tell her.