Apple Flame
raspberry jam rum or brandy 1 cup beaten cream Pare and core the apples; boil sugar and water together ten minutes; arrange apples in buttered baking dish two inches apart; add syrup; cover and bake until apples are tender. Be careful to preserve shape of apples.
Remove from dish; boil syrup until thick; fill cavities with jam, pour syrup around them, and just before sending to table pour over them brandy or rum. Light and serve.
The ingredient list has come down to us incomplete — the apples, sugar and water are named only in the method — so treat this as a framework rather than a formula. It is a baked apple flambé, and the two things that decide whether it works are the shape of the apples and the temperature of the spirit.
- Filling in the quantitiesNothing but the ten-minute boil is given, so the rest is guesswork: for six medium baking apples a syrup of about 1 cup sugar to 1 cup water works, boiled the stated ten minutes. Allow roughly 2 tablespoons of jam per apple and about 1/4 cup of spirit for the whole dish.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to bake until tender. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it. Covered, the apples will need 35 to 50 minutes depending on variety and size; test with a skewer at the shoulder rather than the top.
- Apples that hold their shapeThe instruction to preserve the shape is the hinge of the recipe. Use a firm variety — Braeburn, Northern Spy, Golden Delicious — and avoid McIntosh or any apple bred to collapse into sauce. Core from the stem end without piercing the base so the cavity holds jam.
- Spacing and the covered dishTwo inches apart is not fussiness: crowded apples steam into each other and slump. A lid or foil keeps them from drying while the syrup does the sweetening.
- Reducing the syrupAfter the apples come out, boil the syrup down until it coats a spoon and runs thick, but stop well short of caramel — it will set hard around the apples as it cools on the plate.
- Lighting itCold spirit will not catch. Warm the rum or brandy in a small pan until it is hot to the finger but not simmering, pour it over the apples, and light it with a long match at arm's length. Never pour from the bottle toward a flame. An 80-proof spirit lights readily; anything lower often will not.
- The creamThe cup of beaten cream is never mentioned in the method, so it was presumably served alongside rather than baked in. Whip it to soft peaks to cut the reduced syrup and jam.
- YieldNo yield is given; on the six apples assumed above, it serves six. Bake and fill ahead if you like, but reheat gently and flame only at the table, since the effect lasts under a minute.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, was a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook that ranged well beyond chocolate into the whole repertoire of the turn-of-the-century American dessert course. The title "Flame" is presumably the plain English equivalent of the French flambe, though the book does not say so. Baked apples filled with jam and served with cream are far older and thoroughly domestic; the spirit poured over at the last moment is what promotes them from nursery food to a company dessert. Raspberry jam was a common preserve of the period, and its sharpness holds up against a sweet syrup.