Home › Pudding Recipes › Baked Apples (Cupful of the water Cover)
Baked Apples (Cupful of the water Cover)
cupful of the water. Cover and bake in the oven until they soften a little.
Beat the butter and sugar together, spread them over the quinces, and add the rest of the water.
Bake until they are very soft. They should be basted often with the liquid in the dish.
These quinces are very good if served hot with ice cream. They are also good if served cold with whipped and sweetened cream. 6 bananas
This page is a fragment: the heading says apples, the text describes quinces, and the opening — the fruit, the butter and sugar quantities, and the first part of the water measurement — has been lost with the page break. The line "6 bananas" at the end belongs to the recipe that follows. What survives is still a usable method, provided you supply the proportions.
- What is missingThere is no quantity of quinces, butter or sugar, and only the tail of a water measurement ("...cupful of the water"). Any figure given here would be invention. Work from a known ratio instead: roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 1/2 cup sugar to four halved, cored quinces, with about a cup of water divided between the two bakings.
- Quinces are not applesDespite the heading, this is a quince recipe, and quinces behave nothing like apples. Raw they are hard, dry and astringent, and they need long, moist heat before they turn tender and take on the pink-amber colour that is the point of cooking them.
- Peel and core firstThe skin is tough and the core is stony. Peel, quarter and core before the first bake; a heavy knife and a steady board are needed, as the flesh resists.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven heat, only 'bake in the oven.' A moderate oven, around 325-350F, suits it: higher heat drives off the liquid before the fruit softens, and this recipe depends on there being syrup left to baste with.
- TimingExpect 45 minutes to an hour covered for the first stage, then another 45 minutes to an hour after the butter and sugar go on. "Very soft" is literal: the pieces should collapse under a spoon. Undercooked quince is grainy and stays astringent.
- The bastingThis is the instruction that matters. The sugar and the fruit's own pectin thicken the liquid into a syrup, and spooning it back over the quinces every fifteen minutes or so is what glazes them and deepens the colour. Left alone, the tops dry out and the syrup scorches at the edge of the dish.
- CupfulIn an American book working to standardised measure, a cupful is 8 fluid ounces, the same as a modern cup.
- Yield and servingFour quinces prepared this way serve four. The original's two suggestions still hold: hot with ice cream, or cold with sweetened whipped cream, the cold version being the better of the two since the syrup sets to something close to a light jelly.
Quinces were a standard American fruit into the early twentieth century — grown in kitchen gardens, valued for their high pectin, and used far more often for preserves and jelly than eaten out of hand, since they are hard and astringent raw. They faded from home cooking as commercial pectin made them less necessary for jam-making and as orchards turned to fruit that could be sold fresh. The appeal of a fruit like quince to a covered baking dish is obvious, since it rewards exactly the long, sealed, moist baking that such a dish does best. The double bake here — soften first, then sugar and butter — is the older method for firm fruit, on the principle that sugar added at the start firms the flesh and slows softening.