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Baked Apples
Remove the core from eight apples of uniform size.
Place in baking dish, add one fourth cup water, and baste frequently, during baking, with sugar and water.
Baked Apples No. 2 Core eight apples, arrange in baking dish, fill cavities with butter and sugar, bake until tender, basting with sugar and water. When done, arrange in serving dish; sprinkle with granulated sugar. 8 apples 2 cups sugar cup water
Two versions of the same dish, given without an oven temperature and with an ingredient list that has lost a fraction in setting. A little interpretation is needed before you start.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal in a book written for ranges without thermometers. Bake at 350-375F; 40 to 60 minutes depending on the size and variety of the apple.
- The garbled ingredient list"cup water" has dropped its fraction; the method above specifies one fourth cup, so read it as 1/4 cup. The 2 cups of sugar presumably covers both the cavity filling and the basting syrup, and is generous by modern taste — 3/4 to 1 cup will do.
- Basting syrup"Basting with sugar and water" means dissolving sugar in the pan liquid and spooning it back over the fruit every ten minutes or so. That repeated glazing is what gives the skins their lacquer; skip it and you have plain steamed apples.
- Choice of appleUse a variety that holds together — Rome Beauty, Northern Spy, Braeburn, Granny Smith. Softer dessert apples such as McIntosh will collapse into sauce before the centres are hot.
- Score the skinsCut a shallow ring through the skin around the equator of each apple. The peel shrinks faster than the flesh and will split messily otherwise.
- Butter in No. 2About a teaspoon of butter and a tablespoon of sugar per cavity is right. Any more and it boils out into the dish rather than caramelising in the core.
- Testing and yieldDone means a thin knife slides into the shoulder of the apple with no resistance. Eight apples serve eight; the dish is at its best warm rather than hot, with cream.
Baked apples are often said to be among the oldest sweet dishes in the English-speaking kitchen — fruit, sugar and an oven that is already hot from something else — and they appear in nineteenth-century American cookbooks so often that authors rarely bothered to explain them. Their place in Lowney's Cook Book is worth noting: the book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the period it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a full domestic repertoire — plausibly, though not by documented intent, so that a cook would keep the volume on the shelf year-round. A dessert requiring nothing but apples, sugar and water also reflects an era when fruit was bought by the barrel in autumn and cooks needed a use for apples past their prime for eating raw, baking being a common enough remedy for a wrinkled skin or a mealy texture.