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Baked Apples to Serve with Meat
Wash and core cooking apples and fill with equal parts of crumbs and mushrooms or potatoes. Season with catsup, Chili sauce, or herbs. Place apples in baking dish with a bit of butter in each and a little water. Bake till tender.
A savoury stuffed apple meant as a garnish for pork, goose or ham rather than a dessert. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own apples, so the two things worth fixing are the temperature and the state of the filling.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Bake at 350-375F, uncovered, and allow 30-45 minutes depending on size. The apples are done when a skewer slides through the flesh but the skin has not yet burst.
- Cook the mushrooms firstRaw mushrooms shed a great deal of water and will make the crumb filling sodden. Sauté them in butter until the liquid has cooked off before mixing. If using potato, it should be cooked and mashed or finely diced.
- Crumbs'Crumbs' here is most likely stale bread, grated or crushed, which gives an absorbent texture; soft fresh crumbs will go pasty. Packaged panko is not a period equivalent.
- Cooking applesA firm, tart variety that holds its shape: Granny Smith, Northern Spy or Braeburn. Bramley is the traditional English cooker but tends to break down to a puree, so keep the baking time short if you use it. Softer dessert apples will collapse.
- CoringCore from the stem end without cutting through the base, leaving a cavity with a floor so the butter and filling stay put. Scoring a ring around the equator of the skin keeps it from splitting.
- CatsupCatsup of this period was often thinner and more vinegary than today's sweet ketchup, and the word could still cover mushroom or walnut catsups as well as tomato. Worcestershire, a spoonful of tomato paste loosened with vinegar, or simply thyme and sage will all sit within the intended range of flavour.
- Water in the dishA quarter inch is enough. It exists to keep the bottoms from scorching, not to poach the apples; more than that and the skins slip and the filling washes out.
- YieldFigure one apple per person as a side dish. They are best served hot, straight from the baking dish, with roast pork or a fatty bird.
History: Apples have long been cooked alongside meat as well as in puddings: the fruit's acidity cuts fat, which is one reason apple sauce attached itself to pork and goose across northern Europe and came to America with both English and German cooking. Single-subject fruit cookbooks were common in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century, some of them connected with growers' associations or home-economics writers, and a number of them pressed the apple beyond the dessert course. A savoury stuffing of crumbs and mushrooms, seasoned with catsup or chili sauce, reads as part of that impulse, the apple treated much like the stuffed tomato or pepper of the same period.