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Nice Preparation of Apples
Quarter and core some well-flavored apples, place in a shallow tin pan or plate, sprinkle thickly with white sugar and a few small pieces of cinnamon. Pour on enough cold water to half cover the apples, and scatter a few small pieces of butter over them. Cook slowly till thoroughly done, then set away to cool.--Mrs. McG.
A plain baked-apple dish with no oven temperature, quantity or timing given — all of which are easy to supply. The one thing worth getting right is the pan: a shallow tin with the apples in a single layer, half-covered in liquid, so the sugar and butter reduce to a syrup rather than a soup.
- QuantitySix to eight medium apples fill a 9x13-inch pan in one layer and serve four to six. Doubling up in layers means the top apples steam and the bottom ones collapse.
- OvenCook slowly -- the recipe specifies only a shallow tin pan or plate and gives no method, so it may be oven or stovetop. If baked, around 325F uncovered for 40 to 50 minutes, until a knife goes through the thickest quarter without resistance. It works equally well on the stovetop over low heat in a wide saute pan.
- Which apples"Well-flavored" most likely indicated a firm cooking apple; Virginia varieties of the period included the Winesap and the Newtown Pippin, known locally as the Albemarle Pippin. Modern apples that hold their shape are Braeburn, Winesap, Jonagold or Granny Smith. Red Delicious goes to mush.
- White sugar"Sprinkle thickly" is roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup for eight apples. Start at the lower end and taste the syrup partway through.
- Cinnamon"A few small pieces" means broken stick cinnamon, not ground. Two or three sticks snapped into pieces, fished out before serving. Ground cinnamon will work but clouds the syrup.
- ButterAbout 2 tablespoons cut into small bits and scattered over the top. It is there for gloss and body in the syrup, not richness.
- Peel or notThe recipe says only quarter and core, so the skins stay on. They hold the quarters together and tint the syrup pink if the apples are red-skinned. Peel them if you prefer a softer result.
- ServingSetting it away to cool is part of the recipe — the syrup thickens and the apples firm up. Good cold or at room temperature with cream, or alongside pork or ham.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of these short unfussy fruit dishes, credited to their authors by initial — "Mrs. McG." would have been known to the book's original readers and is anonymous to us. Apples were the practical fruit of the Virginia household: the Albemarle Pippin was a celebrated local variety, exported to England by the barrel in the nineteenth century, and a well-kept cellar could supply apples from autumn into spring. A dish like this belongs to a much older English tradition of baked and stewed apples, and the differences from a modern baked apple are telling — no filling, no coring whole, no raisins or nuts, just quartered fruit, sugar, spice and butter. The title itself, "Nice Preparation of Apples," may reflect an older usage in which nice carried the sense of dainty or precisely done, though by 1879 the sense of merely pleasant was well established, so that reading is a possibility rather than a certainty.