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Baked Apples (Little orange marmalade cupful)
3 large apples. A little orange marmalade ½ cupful whipped cream A few chopped nut meats 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) sugar 1 gill (1/2 cup) water 1 teaspoonful lemon juice Core the apples and place them on a fireproof baking dish. Mix the sugar, water, and lemon juice together, then pour them over the apples. Bake until tender but not broken; fill the centers with the marmalade. Beat up the cream, add one teaspoonful of sugar to it, press it on to the top of the apples, using a forcing bag and tube.
Decorate with the chopped nuts.
A tidy dessert built on one ingredient the original leaves out entirely: the apples. Everything else is a garnish, so quantities are elastic.
- How many applesThe recipe never says. The syrup and cream given here will suit roughly four to six medium baking apples; a firm variety that holds its shape, such as Rome, is what "tender but not broken" requires.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the original helpfully glosses. The two heaping tablespoonfuls of sugar are given as 2 oz, so weigh rather than spoon if you want the syrup consistent.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is stated. Bake at 350F, allowing 35 to 50 minutes depending on size, and baste once or twice with the syrup from the dish.
- Core, do not peelThe skin is the structure. Take the core out from the stem end without cutting through the base, or the syrup and later the marmalade will run straight out.
- The cream measurement"1½ cupful whipped cream" is ambiguous. Read it as 1½ cups heavy cream before whipping, which yields about three cups whipped and is generous for six apples; a cup of cream is plenty for four.
- Forcing bag and tubeA piping bag and star nozzle. The cream must be whipped stiff and the apples fully cold, or it will slump the moment it touches them.
- Fireproof baking dishGlazed earthenware or heatproof glass ovenware would answer; any shallow ovenproof dish works. Keep the apples close together so the syrup does not spread thin and scorch.
- ServingFill and pipe just before the table. Marmalade in a warm apple will thin and bleed into the cream if it stands.
Baked apples are old and unremarkable; what dates this version is the decoration. The orange marmalade filling points to a household stocked with thick-cut Seville preserve of the sort Scottish and English firms had been selling in jars since the nineteenth century, and the piped cream with chopped nuts reads as a confectioner's finish applied to a nursery pudding to make it fit for company.