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Scalloped Apples
Pare a dozen apples and slice thin.
Butter a dish, put in a layer of apples, then a layer of sugar, cinnamon, butter and flour, then another layer of apples, etc, until the dish is full. Bake slowly for one hour. - Mrs F. B. Kellogg.
A layered baked apple pudding with no measurements at all — the proportions are left to the cook. A few decisions will make or break it.
- "Bake slowly"The recipe names no oven, but slow baking in this period corresponds to roughly 300–325F. An hour at that heat lets the apples collapse into their own syrup rather than scorching at the edges before the centre softens.
- How many applesA dozen pared, thinly sliced apples is somewhere around 3 to 4 lb of fruit depending on their size, enough to fill a 9x13 dish or a 3-quart baking dish generously. Halve it for a smaller household.
- Quantities for the layersFor that much fruit, figure on about 3/4 cup sugar, 4 tablespoons butter in small bits, 3 to 4 tablespoons flour and 1 to 2 teaspoons cinnamon, divided among the layers. The flour is there only to thicken the juices; too much makes a paste.
- Choice of appleUse a firm variety that holds its shape — Braeburn, Granny Smith, Northern Spy — rather than a soft eating apple that will turn to sauce in an hour. Slice no thicker than 1/8 inch so the layers settle together.
- Cover, then uncoverThe dish has no liquid added, so cover it for the first 40 minutes to trap steam, then finish uncovered to let the top layer brown and the syrup reduce.
- Finish the topIf the last layer laid down is apples, it will dry out. Reserve a little of the butter, sugar and flour for a final scattering, or add buttered breadcrumbs, which often appear in dishes called "scalloped" though this one does not call for them.
- Yield and servingServes 8 to 10. Best warm rather than hot, with cream, a spoonful of hard sauce, or vanilla ice cream.
"Scalloped" in nineteenth-century American cookery meant nothing more than layered and baked in a shallow dish, usually with butter and crumbs — the same logic that gives us scalloped potatoes and scalloped oysters, and it applied as readily to fruit as to fish. Apple desserts of this kind were a staple of the hot-dessert chapters of household books of the era because apples kept in a cellar all winter and needed no pastry, no eggs and no watching. The recipe is attributed to Mrs F. B. Kellogg, and the measurements are casual throughout.