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Stewed Apples
Pare and core eight apples. Arrange in baking dish; fill cavities with apple jelly and chopped raisins. Cook until tender, basting with hot water, sugar and lemon juice. Ten minutes before removing from oven, spear all over with slivers of blanched almonds. ½ cup butter cup flour 1 cup milk Vanilla Soufflé 4 eggs cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 teaspoon salt Make a white sauce with flour, butter, salt and milk. Beat yolks of eggs; add sugar, white sauce. Cut and fold in the well-beaten whites. Bake in individual ramekin dishes in a moderate oven, twenty to thirty minutes. Serve immediately with orange or sherry sauce.
Orange Soufflé 3 egg yolks rind of one half orange 3 egg whites 1 tablespoon orange juice 3 tablespoons powdered sugar tablespoon lemon juice 1 teaspoon salt Beat yolks until lemon-colored and thick. Add sugar, fruit juice and rind. Carefully fold in beaten whites. Pour into buttered dish, and bake fifteen to twenty minutes in moderate oven. Serve with strawberry sauce.
Despite the name, this is a baked apple: the fruit sits in a dish in the oven and is basted with a thin syrup rather than simmered on the stove. The original gives no oven setting and no proportions for the basting liquid, so both are worth settling before you start.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no oven setting for the apples; 'moderate oven', the term used elsewhere on this page, is usually taken as somewhere around 350 to 375F. At that heat cored apples take roughly 40 to 60 minutes depending on variety and size; they are done when a skewer passes through the flesh with no resistance.
- The basting liquidNo quantities are given. A workable syrup is about 1 cup hot water, 1/2 cup sugar and the juice of a lemon, brushed or spooned over every 10 to 15 minutes. Keeping it hot matters more than the exact ratio, since cold liquid poured into the dish stalls the baking.
- Choose a baking appleUse a variety that holds its shape: Rome Beauty, Northern Spy, Braeburn or a firm Golden Delicious. Softer-fleshed apples, McIntosh especially, tend to collapse into sauce well before the centres soften.
- Pare and coreParing means peeling. Core from the stem end without cutting through the base, so the cavity holds the jelly and raisins instead of leaking it into the dish.
- Apple jellyThe clear, firm jelly intended here is still sold; if yours is loose, use a little less per apple or the filling will run out as the fruit slackens.
- The almondsBlanched almonds are skinned almonds. Slivering them lengthwise and pushing them into the softened flesh at the very end keeps them crisp; added earlier they simply steam soft in the syrup.
- YieldEight apples serve eight. Use a dish just large enough to hold them without touching, so the syrup pools rather than spreading thin and scorching.
Baked apples with a filled cavity were a standing item in American dessert chapters, cheap enough for every day and presentable enough for company once dressed up. The finishing touch here, spearing the fruit all over with slivers of almond, borrows the motion of larding meat with strips of fat and was said to make a plain baked apple look like a set piece, a treatment sometimes described in some period books as a hedgehog or porcupine. Lowney's Cook Book came out of the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other manufacturer-sponsored books of the era it surrounded its promotional chocolate recipes with a full general cookery course, which is why a dish with no chocolate in it appears in the dessert section at all.