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Old-Fashioned Apple Sauce
Pare, core, and quarter tart apples and at supper time place in a small crock on the back of the (warm) stove, pouring over the apples a pint of sugar dissolved in a cup of hot water. Cover the crock close and let stand till morning when the apples will be tender and may be served as a breakfast dish or set aside to be chilled for luncheon or supper.
This is a recipe built around a wood or coal range that stayed warm all night — the apples cook in residual heat rather than on a burner. A slow cooker or a very low oven stands in for it.
- A pint of sugarMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups of granulated sugar. The recipe gives no quantity of apples, but that is a great deal of sugar for a small crock, and the result is closer to a preserve than to modern apple sauce. Halving it gives a less sweet sauce, and tart apples can take less still.
- "The back of the (warm) stove"The apples cook in the range's residual heat, which was low and falling overnight; no temperature is recorded. The nearest equivalents are a slow cooker on low or a covered crock in a very low oven. Do not attempt it on a modern gas or electric hob left unattended overnight.
- The crockA lidded stoneware bean pot or any heavy covered casserole. The tight cover matters: the single cup of water is all the liquid there is, and the apples must steam in their own juice rather than dry out.
- Apples"Tart" here means a firm cooking apple that holds its shape in sugar syrup — Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening. (Bramleys are tart but cook down to a purée.) Sweet dessert apples tend to collapse and taste flat against this much sugar.
- Quartered, not slicedThe point of the long slow cook is tender quarters sitting in syrup, not a purée. Cut them any smaller and they will fall apart before morning.
- Yield and keepingThe yield depends entirely on how much your crock holds; the recipe gives no quantity. The high sugar and the apples' own acid help it keep; refrigerate once cool and use within a week.
Apple sauce made overnight in the range's dying heat was thrift as much as cookery — it used warmth that would otherwise be wasted and spared the morning cook some labour. Recipes of this kind are common in nineteenth-century American household books, where the kitchen fire was never fully out. The quantity of sugar reflects a period when apple sauce sat somewhere between a fruit dish and a sweet preserve, served at breakfast, at supper, or cold at luncheon as this recipe suggests. The apple was the one fruit an American household could count on having in quantity through the winter, barrelled in the cellar and worked through in sauce, butter, pies and dried rings until spring.