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Apple Sauce
Put in saucepan Tops, cores, and small pieces of apple removed in the making of apple shells. Add 3/4 3/4 cup water in which apple balls were soaked and cook gently until apple is soft. Rub through a strainer. Add 3/4 cup sugar, and stir and cook until sugar is dissolved and sauce is of the proper consistency. This may be used at another meal.
A scrap-saving sauce that assumes you have just made apple shells and apple balls for another dish, and are left with tops, cores and trimmings. It works perfectly well with whole apples, but the proportions need translating.
- What the recipe assumesApple shells are apples hollowed out to serve as cups; apple balls are scooped from the flesh with a cutter and held in water so they do not brown. This sauce is made from everything left over, so the starting quantity is simply whatever trimmings the earlier dish produced; the recipe does not say how many apples that was.
- The soaking waterCut apple was sometimes held in salted or lemon-acidulated water to keep it from browning, though this recipe does not say what was used. Taste the 3/4 cup before you add it; if it is noticeably salty, use half of it and make up the rest with plain water.
- Straining is the hingeBecause cores, seeds and skin all go into the pan, the sauce must be pushed through a sieve rather than mashed. A food mill with the medium plate does the job in a minute and holds back the seeds and fibrous core; a blender will not, since it pulverises the seeds and skin into the sauce.
- SugarThree-quarters of a cup is sweet by current taste, particularly if the trimmings were few. Add half, cook it in, then judge.
- "Proper consistency"Thick enough to mound on a spoon and not weep on the plate. Stir often once the sugar goes in, as sweetened purée catches on the bottom of the pan quickly.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no yield; it depends entirely on how much trimming you started with. "This may be used at another meal" simply means the sauce keeps; refrigerate it covered and use it within about five days. It is not a canning recipe and gives no processing directions, so do not treat it as one.
- ServingApple sauce of this sweetness was sent to the table with roast pork, ham, goose or sausage, or spooned over plain cake or rice pudding.
This comes from the kind of entertaining manual that treated a luncheon as a small piece of stagecraft: apples hollowed into shells and filled with salad or ice, the flesh cut into neat balls for garnish. What is telling is that the recipe exists at all. Having spent an apple's flesh on decoration, the book turns immediately to the tops, cores and ragged pieces and makes a second dish of them, to be served at another meal. That instinct — that the trimmings are inventory, not waste — is a recurring one in American household cookery, and here it sits alongside the frankly ornamental. Cooking the apple whole, skin and core included, and then straining also has a practical basis: peel and core carry colour and pectin.