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APPLES, BAKED (another way)
Take eight or nine good baking apples: wipe them carefully, and place them in a shallow earthenware dish, half an inch apart. Put them in a gentle oven, cook them as slowly as possible, and do not allow them to burst. When quite tender, set them aside to cool, and serve with sifted sugar. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 6d. Allow one for each person.
A plain baked apple, cooked whole and unstuffed. The whole recipe hinges on low heat and patience: rushed, the skins split and the flesh collapses into sauce.
- "A gentle oven"The recipe gives no temperatures; a slow oven of this kind is usually approximated at around 300-325F. Anything hotter forces steam through the skin and the apples burst, which the recipe explicitly warns against.
- Keep them from burstingPrick or lightly score each apple once around its circumference before baking so it has somewhere to give. Spacing them half an inch apart, as directed, lets heat reach all sides evenly rather than steaming them together.
- Choice of apple"good baking apples" would have meant a cooking rather than an eating variety. Bramleys tend to froth and collapse; for a whole apple that holds its shape use a firmer variety such as Braeburn, Golden Delicious or Northern Spy.
- The dishA shallow earthenware dish holds heat gently and evenly. A ceramic or glass baking dish is the modern equivalent; avoid a thin metal sheet pan, which browns the bottoms before the centres soften. A tablespoon or two of water in the dish stops the juices from scorching.
- TimeThree-quarters of an hour suits medium apples. Large ones will want an hour or more at this temperature. Test with a skewer through the side, not the top: the flesh should give with no resistance.
- "Sifted sugar"Confectioners' or caster sugar, sifted over the fruit at the table. No sugar goes in during baking, which is the point of the recipe: the apple concentrates on its own.
- Cost and yield6d is sixpence in pre-decimal currency, a note on household economy rather than a measurement. One apple per person, eight or nine apples, served cool rather than hot.
Baked apples were among the cheapest respectable sweet dishes in a nineteenth-century British household: no pastry, no sugar to speak of, no attention beyond keeping the fire low, and they made use of the hard cooking apples that stored well through winter in a cellar or loft. The recipe appears as a dictionary-style entry headed "APPLES, BAKED (another way)", and gives a costing for the whole dish, which is characteristic of a book written for middle-class households running to a budget. The instruction to serve with sifted sugar rather than cream or custard keeps it firmly in the plain-cookery category; richer versions of the period hollowed the core and filled it with sugar, butter, dried fruit or marmalade before baking. The insistence on slow cooking and unbroken skins reflects the reality of a coal range, where a cook chose a cooler corner of the oven rather than setting a temperature.