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Apples with Rolled Oats
6 large apples 1 1/4 cups sugar 1 quart water 1 cup cooked rolled oats Cook the rolled oats. Pare the apples, and cook in a syrup of the water and sugar. Turn frequently. When the apples are done, fill the centers with cooked rolled oats. Boil down the syrup until of a rather thick consistency, and pour over the apples. Other left over cereals may be used in the same way.
A thrift dessert built around yesterday's breakfast porridge: apples poached in sugar syrup, stuffed, and glazed with the reduced poaching liquid. The instructions leave out one step and understate another.
- Core the applesThe recipe says to pare them and later to fill the centers, but never says to core. Remove the core from the stem end with a melon baller or apple corer without cutting through the base, so the cavity holds the oats and the fruit keeps its shape.
- A firm apple onlyChoose a variety that holds together when poached, such as Braeburn, Gala or Golden Delicious. McIntosh and most soft baking apples will collapse into sauce in a thin syrup.
- The syrup is deliberately thinOne and a quarter cups sugar to a quart of water is a poaching liquid, not a glaze: roughly three parts water to one part sugar by volume. It cooks the fruit without candying it, which is why the second boiling-down step exists.
- Poaching timeSimmer, do not boil hard, and expect 15 to 25 minutes depending on size and variety. The apples are done when a skewer meets no resistance at the thickest part. Turning them frequently, as directed, matters because they float and the exposed side cooks slowly.
- Reducing the syrupLift the apples out first, then reduce the remaining liquid over medium-high heat. In a wide pan this may take upwards of 20 to 30 minutes, depending on how much liquid is left. Stop while it still coats a spoon; taken too far it hardens to caramel on the cold fruit.
- How much oatmealOne cup of cooked rolled oats comes from roughly half a cup dry. Old-fashioned rolled oats hold their texture better here than quick or instant. Warm the oats before filling so the finished dish is not lukewarm in the middle.
- YieldSix apples, one per person. Best served warm the day it is made; the oats stiffen in the refrigerator.
Books published under titles like Meatless Cookery belong to a wave of American household writing that peaked around the food-conservation campaigns of the First World War, when meatless and wheatless days were promoted as a patriotic duty and cookbooks reorganised themselves around what could be left out — though such titles also appeared before and independently of the war, for vegetarian and economy reasons. The economy here runs deeper than the absence of meat: the dessert exists to use up cold cereal, and the closing line — "other left over cereals may be used in the same way" — is the whole point of the entry. Stuffed poached apples are often said to be a long-established dish, filled with sugar, butter, nuts or dried fruit; substituting a cupful of porridge makes a formal dessert out of what would otherwise have been scraped into the bin.