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Pork, Roast, Apple Sauce For
Peel some apples, cut them into quarters, and put them into a stewpan with a little brown sugar and water. Stir well with a wooden spoon, add a little butter, and when done enough send the sauce to table. The apples must not be too much stewed, or they will lose their acidity and also become too brown.
A plain stewed apple sauce with no quantities given, which is normal for Cassell's — the cook was expected to judge by eye. A few specifics make it repeatable.
- Working quantitiesNo amounts are given. As a starting point, four medium cooking apples (roughly 1½ lb) with 2–3 tablespoons water, 1–2 tablespoons brown sugar and a walnut of butter (about 1 tablespoon) will make enough sauce for four to six alongside a roast.
- Choose a tart appleThe instruction not to lose the acidity only works if the apple had acidity to begin with. Bramley, Granny Smith or another firm cooking apple will hold up; a sweet dessert apple gives a flat, cloying sauce.
- Water, not much of itA little water means just enough to keep the pan from catching — a few tablespoons. Cooking apples release plenty of their own juice, and a wet start gives you thin sauce you then have to boil down.
- The hinge: stop earlyThe warning against over-stewing is the point of the recipe. Once the quarters collapse and darken, the fresh tartness that cuts roast pork fat is gone. Cook covered over low heat 10–15 minutes, until the pieces are soft enough to crush but still pale and distinct.
- StewpanAny small heavy saucepan with a lid. A wooden spoon will not scratch the pan, and may also have been preferred over metal with acidic fruit.
- Texture and sugarCassell's leaves it chunky. Beat it smooth with the spoon or pass it through a sieve if you prefer. Add the sugar late and taste as you go — modern cooking apples vary widely, and the sauce should stay noticeably sharp.
- ServingMeant to go to table warm with the roast. It keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator and reheats gently.
Apple sauce with pork is one of the oldest surviving English meat-and-fruit pairings, descended from the medieval habit of serving sharp fruit sauces — verjuice, sorrel, barberries, apples — with meat, where the acid does the work later taken over by mustard and vinegar. By the eighteenth century the combination was fixed enough that cookery writers listed apple sauce among the standing accompaniments to roast pork and goose, and it survives in that role largely unchanged. The interest of the entry is technical: the note that over-stewed apples "lose their acidity and also become too brown" is a lesson about heat and sugar dressed up as a recipe, and the same caution applies to any fruit cooked as a foil to fat. The brown sugar darkens the sauce faster, which is part of why the warning was needed.