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Stuffed Apple Salad
Blanche E. Triggs.
Peel and core as many firm apples as desired. Cook until tender but not mushy in a thin syrup colored with red cinnamon candies or fruit coloring. Chill and fill centers with chopped nuts and celery. Serve on lettuce leaf with mayonnaise.
Katherine Hafemann.
A mid-century church-supper salad that depends entirely on the apples holding their shape. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: poach, never boilKeep the syrup at a bare shiver, around 180-190F, and turn the apples occasionally so they take color evenly. A rolling boil will blow them out into applesauce before the centers are tender.
- Red cinnamon candiesThese are cinnamon imperials, the small hot red candies sold under brand names such as Red Hots. Something on the order of 1/3 cup per quart of syrup gives both the scarlet color and a distinct cinnamon heat; fruit coloring alone gives color and nothing else. Add them to the hot syrup and stir until fully dissolved before the apples go in.
- A thin syrupThe original assumes a cook knows the term. Definitions varied from book to book, but roughly 1 cup sugar to 2 or 3 cups water is the usual sense. Thicker syrup candies the outside before the inside cooks through.
- Apple choiceFirm means firm. Golden Delicious, Braeburn or Granny Smith hold up; McIntosh and most modern soft eating apples collapse. Reckon 15-25 minutes depending on size and variety, and test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- CoringCore from the stem end without cutting through the base, so the apple becomes a cup. A melon baller or a small paring knife worked in a circle does this more neatly than an apple corer, which punches straight through.
- Chill in the syrupThe instruction says chill, but the color deepens considerably if the apples cool in the poaching liquid rather than out of it. Several hours or overnight is better than one.
- The fillingChopped celery and nuts alone are dry. A spoonful of mayonnaise or softened cream cheese will bind them and also helps keep the filling seated in the apple.
- YieldOne apple per person as a salad course. The syrup keeps and can be reused for a second batch within a few days.
Community cookbooks like this one are full of fruit salads dressed with mayonnaise and set on a lettuce leaf, a convention of American home entertaining from roughly the 1910s through the 1960s, when the salad course was expected to be sweet, cold and visually arranged. The cinnamon-candy poaching liquid is a distinctly American trick: cinnamon imperials were cheap, shelf-stable, and did the work of both dye and spice in one step, which is why they turn up in period recipes for spiced crabapples, pickled peaches and cinnamon apple rings. The two names attached to it, one at the head and one at the foot, may be an artifact of church cookbook compilation, where the same recipe could reach the committee from more than one kitchen, though an attribution line misplaced from an adjacent recipe is at least as likely.