Home › Fruits and Cereals › Baked Apples
Baked Apples
Pare some good apples, and scoop out the cores. Put a little sugar and 2 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.
A plain baked apple with almost no quantities given, which means the cook decides how sweet and how wet the dish becomes. Two decisions matter: the apple variety and how much liquid goes into the dish.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300F (150C). At that heat three-quarters of an hour is right for a medium apple; a large one may want an hour or more. The apples are done when a skewer slides through the flesh without resistance but the fruit still holds its shape.
- Choose a firm baking appleBramley, Golden Delicious, Braeburn or Rome hold up. Very soft eating apples collapse into sauce well before the time given, which is why the recipe insists the apples not touch: the sides need to set rather than fuse.
- Peeling changes the dishThe instruction to pare is deliberate and unusual. Peeled apples soak up the wine syrup and brown lightly at the edges; if you leave the skin on, the skin will contain the fruit and you get a steamed apple instead. Either works, but they are not the same dessert.
- The wine"Sweet wine" here means a fortified or dessert wine: sherry, madeira, marsala, muscat or a sweet white. A quarter cup for four apples is enough to make syrup in the bottom of the dish; more than half a cup and the apples poach rather than bake.
- Go easy on the clovesTwo whole cloves per apple is assertive by modern taste, and cloves buried in the hollow release more than cloves laid on top. One per apple, or a pinch of ground cinnamon instead, suits most palates.
- Sugar amountsNothing is specified. About a teaspoon in each hollow and a tablespoon strewn over four apples gives a lightly sweet result; tart Bramleys will want roughly double.
- Lemon rindPare the zest in wide strips with no white pith, and lift the strips out before serving. Left in the syrup they turn bitter as it reduces.
- Cover, then finish uncoveredThe covered dish keeps the apples from drying at low heat. If you want a glaze, uncover for the last ten minutes and spoon the syrup from the dish over the apples once or twice.
- ServingOne apple per person, as written, warm with cream or a spoonful of the wine syrup. They reheat acceptably but the flesh loosens on standing.
Baked apples were a staple cheap dessert of the nineteenth-century household: the fruit stored through winter in a cool cellar, and the dish could be cooked in an oven already heated for other purposes. This version, with its sweet wine and lemon peel, belongs to the more genteel end of the tradition, closer to the compotes of English and French dessert cookery than to the plain apple set on the hearth with a lump of butter. Cloves and lemon were long-standing companions in European fruit cookery, and a slow covered bake was a forgiving method in ovens without thermostats. The telegraphic "Time to bake" and "Sufficient" lines closing the entry are the house style of Victorian household compilations.