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Baked Apples
Core and pare sour apples. Place them in a baking-dish and fill the cavities with sugar and Larkin Cinnamon or Larkin Nutmeg. Allow onehalf cup of sugar and one-fourth teaspoon of Cinnamon or Nutmeg to eight apples. Bake in hot oven till soft. Serve with cream.
A four-line recipe that assumes a cook who already knows what a baked apple looks like when it is done. The only things needing translation are the oven, the brand names and the fruit.
- "Hot oven"Read this as 400-425F. At that heat pared apples will collapse quickly, so check at 25 minutes; 30-40 minutes is typical for medium fruit.
- Larkin Cinnamon, Larkin NutmegHouse-brand spices sold by the Larkin Company, which published this book. Any ground cinnamon or grated nutmeg does the same job; freshly grated nutmeg is noticeably stronger than the pre-ground tins of the period, so start with less than the quarter teaspoon.
- Sour applesTart cooking varieties: Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening are the sort meant, and hold their shape reasonably well; Bramley is equally tart but cooks down to a puree. A sweet dessert apple will turn to sauce and taste flat against the sugar.
- Pared, not just coredThe skin is removed here, which is why the apples bake fast and slump. If you would rather they kept their shape, leave the skin on and score a ring around the middle; expect to add ten minutes.
- The sugar is sparingHalf a cup across eight apples is about a tablespoon each, which suits genuinely sour fruit. Taste your apples and adjust rather than following the ratio blindly.
- Add liquid to the dishThe recipe says nothing about it, but a quarter inch of water or cider in the bottom keeps the sugar from scorching and gives you a syrup to spoon over.
- "Serve with cream"Most likely plain unwhipped heavy or light cream, poured cold over the hot apples rather than whipped or made into a custard.
- YieldEight apples, eight servings. Good warm, and better still cold the next morning.
Good Things to Eat came from the Larkin Company of Buffalo, a soap manufacturer that grew into a mail-order household empire by giving away premiums with its orders; cookbooks like this one existed partly to sell the firm's own spices, extracts and baking goods, which is why the cinnamon and nutmeg arrive with a brand attached. The dish itself needs no promotion. Baked apples are among the oldest sweet uses of the fruit in English and American kitchens, requiring nothing but an oven that happens to be hot from other work. The older sense of putting up fruit covered any handling of the autumn apple crop, and a household with barrels of sour apples in the cellar wanted every way of using them.