Baked Apples
Pare and core the apples, keeping them whole. Put in a baking-dish, and fill the holes with brown sugar. Pour into each apple a little lemon juice, and stick into each a piece of lemon peel. Put enough water to prevent their burning. Bake till tender, but not broken. Set away to cool. Eat with cream on custard. They will keep two days.--Mrs. Dr. J.
A plain baked apple with no oven setting, no quantity of sugar and no time — all of which the period cook was expected to supply. The points below fill those gaps.
- Oven temperatureBake at 350F. The recipe's concern is apples that soften without collapsing, and a hotter oven splits the skinless fruit before the centre gives way.
- Choose a firm appleSince the apples are pared, they have no skin to hold their shape, so the variety does the work. A dense, tart apple such as Braeburn, Winesap or Granny Smith holds up; McIntosh collapses to sauce and Red Delicious goes dry and mealy.
- Sugar and juice quantitiesFigure roughly a tablespoon of brown sugar per apple and a teaspoon of lemon juice. Pack the sugar into the cored channel rather than mounding it on top, or it runs out into the pan and scorches.
- "Enough water"Just enough to film the bottom of the dish. It steams the fruit from below and keeps the sugar syrup from burning; top it up if the dish goes dry partway through.
- TimingForty-five minutes to an hour, depending on size and variety. Test with a thin skewer near the base, which cooks last, and pull them while there is still a little resistance since they continue to soften as they cool.
- The lemon peelUse a wide strip of zest with as little white pith as possible, and remove it before serving. Left in through a long bake, pith turns the syrup bitter.
- "Cream on custard"Probably a typesetter's slip for "cream or custard." Serve cold with heavy cream poured over, or with a thin pouring custard.
- Yield and keepingOne apple per person. The two days claimed at the end assumes a cool larder; refrigerate, covered, and they hold about that long before the flesh weeps.
Baked apples belong to the oldest and thriftiest end of American dessert cookery: fruit from the cellar, a spoonful of sugar, and an oven whose residual heat, one imagines, was rarely wasted. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is built almost entirely of such signed receipts — "Mrs. Dr. J." is typical of the book's habit of crediting a contributor by initial and her husband's title. The detail that marks the dish as a period one is the closing note that they will keep two days: in a kitchen without refrigeration, a cooked-fruit dessert that survived to a second meal was worth recording, and the lemon juice does double duty in keeping the pared flesh from browning. Apples were among the fruits kept through the Southern winter, stored in barrels or straw-lined cellars and drawn on until spring.