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Apples, Baked
Pare some good apples, and scoop out the cores. Put a little sugar and two cloves into each hollow, place them in a dish, not allowing them to touch each other, strew powdered sugar over them, and a little sweet wine with some thin lemon-rind in it. Cover the dish, and bake in a slow oven. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient, one apple for each person. Probable cost, 1d. each.
A straightforward baked apple, distinguished only by the wine and lemon peel in the dish. A few of the original's assumptions need spelling out.
- Slow ovenRead this as somewhere around 275-325F. Three-quarters of an hour at that heat suits a medium apple that has been peeled; a large one will want closer to an hour.
- Choose a cooking apple"Good apples" here most likely points to a tart cooking apple of the Bramley type, which collapses to fluff. A firm dessert apple such as Braeburn or Honeycrisp will hold its shape instead, which is a different dish but a perfectly good one.
- Peeled, not scoredThe recipe pares the apples, and without skin the flesh takes up the wine and sugar more readily. It also means the apples will slump, so use a dish with sides and expect to spoon them out rather than lift them.
- Two cloves is a lotWhole cloves are pungent. One per apple is plenty unless you want the clove to dominate; either way, warn anyone eating that they are in there.
- The wine"Sweet wine" means something like Madeira, sweet sherry or a Muscat. A few tablespoons in the bottom of the dish is enough — it should become a syrup with the sugar and juices, not poach the fruit.
- Cover itThe lid is what keeps the apples from drying and browning at the top. Foil works; take it off for the last ten minutes if you want a little colour.
- Yield and servingOne apple each, as stated. Serve warm with the pan syrup spooned over, and cream or custard if you like.
- Probable costA penny each in old currency.
Baked apples were a staple of English domestic cookery long before Cassell's, valued because they needed no pastry, no eggs and very little sugar, and because they could go into a cooling bread oven after the day's baking was finished. What lifts this particular version out of the nursery is the sweet wine and lemon rind, a touch of the confectioner's manner applied to the fruit. The dictionary's inclusion of a probable cost per portion is characteristic of late-Victorian household manuals, which were written for readers running a kitchen to a budget and expected to be told what a dish would come to. Cassell's also assumed the English cooking apple, a class of fruit bred to break down into a puree on heating; the distinction between cooker and eater is much less sharply drawn in most markets today.