Iced Apples
Pare and core one dozen large apples, fill with sugar and a little butter and nutmeg; bake until nearly done, let cool, and remove to another plate, if it can be done without breaking them (if not, pour off the juice). Ice tops and sides with caking-ice, and brown lightly; serve with cream. -Mrs. R. C. Carson, Harrisburg.
A baked apple dressed up as a dessert course: the apples are baked, cooled, then coated in cake icing and flashed in the oven to set it. Two details govern the outcome — the apples must be fully cool before icing, and they must hold their shape.
- "Caking-ice" means cake icingThe frosting used for cakes, an egg-white-and-sugar icing spread soft and set in the oven rather than poured like a glaze. Icings of this kind run to roughly a cup of sifted sugar per white, sometimes with a few drops of lemon juice.
- Egg-white icing and heatA light browning in the oven will colour the surface but may not bring the interior of the icing to a temperature that pasteurises egg. Use pasteurised egg whites if you are serving anyone who should avoid raw egg, or substitute a boiled (Italian meringue) icing made with hot syrup.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. As modern guidance, 350F for 30-40 minutes depending on size will take large apples to "nearly done": tender to a skewer but still firm enough to lift. For the browning stage, a hot oven (400-425F) for 4-6 minutes, or a broiler watched constantly, is enough to take colour without slumping the icing.
- Choose apples that holdThe recipe's aside about breakage is the hinge. Baldwin, Northern Spy, Braeburn or Granny Smith keep their walls; McIntosh and most sauce apples collapse. Pare only the top third if you want extra insurance, and bake them in a dish just large enough that they support one another.
- Filling quantitiesAbout a tablespoon of sugar, a small knob of butter and a scrape of nutmeg per apple fills the cavity. A dozen large apples will take roughly three-quarters of a cup of sugar and 3 oz butter in total.
- Cool completelyIcing warm apples melts the sugar and it slides off. Let them come to room temperature. The recipe moves them to another plate if they will lift whole, and pours off the juice only if they will not; either way, those juices, reduced slightly, are worth serving alongside rather than discarding.
- "Serve with cream"Almost certainly unwhipped pouring cream, poured cold around the base. Heavy or single cream both work; the point is the cold liquid against the sweet baked fruit.
- YieldTwelve apples, one per person — a full company dessert. The recipe scales down cleanly to four or six.
Baked apples were the plainest of nineteenth-century desserts, cheap enough to be a nursery supper and common enough that cookbooks rarely made much of them. What Mrs. Carson does here is dress the plain thing for the table: the same white cake icing that would go on a layer cake is spread over each apple and browned, turning a homely dish into something that can end a dinner. That impulse runs all through Buckeye Cookery, first issued in 1877 by the Buckeye Publishing Company in Ohio, a compilation of contributions from Ohio and Midwestern housewives, in which the fruit chapters lean heavily on apples the orchard fruit a Midwestern cellar had in quantity from autumn through spring. Recipes signed with a name and a town were the book's method throughout, and the contributors were real women.