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Dried Apple Sauce
Look over, wash thoroughly and soak fifteen minutes in clean warm water; drain, cover with cold soft water, place on the stove, let boil slowly two to four hours, mash fine, sweeten, and season with cinnamon very highly. Never add sugar until about five minutes before removing from the stove, otherwise the fruit will be toughened and hardened. Follow the same direction in preparing dried peaches, only do not mash or season so highly. Cook in porcelain, and do not stir while cooking.
A method rather than a formula — no quantities are given, which was normal for a fruit that came in whatever quantity the drying racks produced. The one direction worth keeping is the sugar timing.
- Sugar lastAdding sugar early does firm dried fruit: sugar in the syrup draws water out of the pieces and the pectin sets while they are still tough. Five minutes at the end is enough to sweeten. This part of the recipe is sound and still worth following.
- Quantity, since none is givenAs a starting point, try about 1 lb dried apple rings to 6 cups water, which will give roughly 4 cups of sauce, enough for six to eight. Sweeten to taste at the end. These figures are a modern suggestion, not the book's.
- Two to four hours is far too longTwo to four hours is longer than modern fruit needs -- That timing assumes hard, thick, air-dried slices. Modern dried apple rings will usually collapse in 30 to 45 minutes of gentle simmering. Check at 20 minutes and cook only until a slice crushes against the side of the pan.
- "Soft water"Water low in calcium and magnesium. Hard water genuinely slows the softening of fruit and pulses; if your tap water is hard, filtered or bottled water is the modern equivalent.
- "Cook in porcelain"Porcelain-lined ironware, the enamelled pots and graniteware of the period. The point is a nonreactive surface, so stainless steel or enamel is fine and bare cast iron or unlined copper is not; apples are acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste.
- Do not stirStirring drags the slices across the bottom before they have softened and encourages scorching in a thick, sugar-free mash. Keep the heat low, keep the lid on, and only break the fruit up once it is tender.
- Cinnamon "very highly"Ground cinnamon of the period was frequently cassia and was a common target for adulteration, so the strength was unpredictable. Start with 1 to 2 teaspoons per pound of dried fruit, or simmer a couple of cassia sticks in the water and remove them before mashing.
- Not a preserve, despite the sectionNot a preserve -- Nothing here is sealed or processed. Treat it as a fresh sauce: refrigerate and use within a week, or freeze.
Dried apples were the default winter fruit of the nineteenth-century American household, and a book like Buckeye Cookery (first published in 1877) assumes a store of them in every cellar. Apples were peeled, cored, strung or spread on racks, and dried in the sun or over the stove; the results kept for a year or more and reconstituted into sauce, pies and "apple butter" long after the fresh crop was gone. Cooking dried apple down into a spiced sauce was the plainest use of all. The instruction to hold back the sugar is practical kitchen observation of what we would now describe as pectin and osmosis, arrived at long before anyone in the household would have used either word.