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Baked Apples
6 medium-sized apples 1 lemon 1 cup water 3/4 cup sugar Wipe, core, and pare the apples. Put in baking dish with a slice of lemon on top of each. Make a syrup of the sugar and water. Pour around the apples, cover, and bake slowly until soft. Serve cold with cream or with one teaspoon jelly in the center of each apple. If desired, the apples may also be flavored with cloves by placing four cloves in the side of each apple at an even distance apart.
Sweet apples are always tough when cooked. The acid of the lemon helps to soften the cellulose of the apple. The skins of the apple break when baking because the steam of the apple must escape, therefore it forces an opening in the thinnest part of the skin. A line cut around the center of the apple will prevent its breaking. Basting apples while cooking makes the skin tender. Steamed apples are served for baking apples in many of the best hotels and restaurants, as they retain their color and flavor much better than when baked.
A straightforward syrup-baked apple, with a page of the author's general notes attached. A few of those notes apply to unpared apples rather than to this recipe as written.
- "Bake slowly"The recipe gives no temperature; a slow oven of roughly 300-325F suits it. Cored and pared apples in syrup will likely need something in the region of 40 to 60 minutes depending on variety and size; they are done when a knife slides in with no resistance at the shoulder.
- Pared, but the notes assume skin-onThe instruction says to pare the apples, so the advice about skins bursting and scoring a line around the middle belongs to whole unpeeled baked apples. Keep it in mind if you leave the skins on, which gives a sturdier apple that holds its shape.
- Choosing the appleThe remark that sweet apples cook tough points toward a tart cooking variety. Bramley or Rhode Island Greening cook down readily to softness; varieties differ considerably in how much they hold their shape.
- The syrupThree-quarters cup sugar to one cup water is a fairly rich syrup. Pour it around the apples rather than over them, and baste two or three times during baking.
- Covered bakingCovering steams as much as it bakes. A lid of foil or a fitted cover keeps the flesh pale and the flavour clean; uncovered, you get more caramel and more colour.
- LemonA slice on each apple perfumes the syrup and keeps the cut flesh from browning. The claim that the acid softens cellulose is period food science and overstated, but the flavour argument stands.
- ClovesFour whole cloves pressed into the side of each apple is assertive by modern taste. Two is plenty, and pull them out before serving.
- Yield and servingSix apples, six servings. Serve cold as directed, with pouring cream, or with a teaspoon of red currant or crab apple jelly dropped into each hollow once the apples have cooled enough to hold it.
Baked apples in syrup are old enough to have no single origin. The tone of the trailing notes, with their talk of cellulose and escaping steam, marks the author as a product of the domestic science movement, which had brought laboratory vocabulary into the kitchen manual. The closing observation that good hotels steamed their baking apples rather than baking them is a nice piece of trade knowledge: steam keeps the flesh pale and the flavour fresh, which matters when apples are held and served cold, as here.