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Baked Apples and Onions
Peel and thinly slice equal parts of onions and tart apples. Butter a baking dish then fill it with alternate layers of the onions, apples, salt, pepper, a pinch of sugar and a few bits of butter. When the dish is full pour over a little boiling waterjust enough to keep from burning-cover closely and bake in a moderate oven until very tender.
A frugal scalloped vegetable dish that depends almost entirely on slicing thinly and covering tightly. The original gives no oven number, no timing and no quantity, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. At that heat a dish about 2 inches deep will likely need something like 60 to 75 minutes covered, until a knife meets no resistance in the onion.
- Slice thickness is the hingeOnion softens more slowly than apple. Cut both about 1/8 inch, on a mandoline if you have one, or the apple will collapse to sauce while the onion is still crisp.
- Choose the apple for structureTart means Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy or a firm russet. A sweet modern eating apple such as Gala or Red Delicious turns to mush and makes the dish cloying.
- "A little boiling water"Two to three tablespoons for a 1 1/2-quart dish is enough. Apples and onions both release a great deal of liquid under a lid, and too much water leaves a watery pool rather than a glaze.
- Cover closelyThis is steam cooking, not roasting. A tight lid, or foil crimped hard to the rim, is what makes the vegetables tender rather than dry and leathery at the top.
- Butter and saltFigure about 2 tablespoons butter and 3/4 teaspoon salt for 1 pound each of apples and onions, distributed across the layers rather than dumped on top.
- Optional browningIf you want colour, uncover for the last 10 minutes once everything is tender. Doing it earlier stalls the cooking.
- Yield and servingA pound each of apples and onions serves four as a side. It is a natural partner to pork, sausages, liver or roast duck, and reheats well.
Onions baked or stewed with apples belong to a long northern European tradition of pairing pork and its accompaniments with fruit acidity, and the combination survives in the apple-and-onion beds under a roasting goose. Its appearance in a low-cost cookery collection is easily explained: onions and cooking apples were among the cheapest keepers in a cellar, both held for months without processing, and the dish needs only butter, salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar besides. A filling vegetable dish that could stretch a small piece of meat was worth more than a fashionable one.