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Maple Apple
1 cup maple syrup 1 cup water 4 medium-sized apples Pare and core the apples. Heat the water and syrup to the boiling point. Drop the apples into the heated liquid, turning often in order to insure cooking uniformly. Remove the apples when tender. Allow the liquid to cook down to a syrupy consistency, and pour over the apples.
A straightforward syrup-poached apple that depends almost entirely on choosing fruit that holds its shape. A few notes on pan, timing and yield.
- The hinge: pick a firm appleWhole pared apples collapse fast in boiling syrup. Use a dense, tart variety such as Braeburn, Granny Smith, Northern Spy or Winesap; McIntosh and similar softer apples will slump into sauce before the centres are tender.
- Pan and depthA cup of syrup and a cup of water will not cover four apples. Use a saucepan just wide enough to hold them in one layer, keep the liquid at a bare simmer, and turn them every few minutes as directed so the exposed sides cook evenly.
- TimingExpect 15 to 25 minutes depending on size and variety. Test with a thin skewer at the thickest part; it should meet only slight resistance. Pull them a shade early, since they carry on softening as they cool.
- Reducing the syrupAfter the apples come out, the poaching liquid needs roughly 10 to 15 minutes at a brisk boil to thicken. Maple syrup scorches easily once it concentrates, so watch the last few minutes and take it off while it still pours.
- Maple syrup gradesFarm and household maple syrup of the period was often darker and stronger-tasting than the palest grades sold today, though light syrup was also made and prized. A darker grade (sold in the US as Grade A Dark Robust or Very Dark Strong) will give a more pronounced maple flavour; the lightest grades tend to read as merely sweet.
- Coring whole applesAn apple corer or a melon baller lets you remove the core without cutting the fruit in half, which is what the recipe intends. Halved or quartered apples work too and cook in about half the time.
- Yield and servingServes four. Good warm or chilled, with the reduced syrup spooned over; cream, thick yoghurt or a plain custard suits it if the meatless-menu context allows dairy.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of American cookbooks published around the period of the First World War, driven variously by ideas of health and therapeutic diet and, from 1917, by organised meat conservation campaigns as much as by vegetarian conviction, and publishers hurried out volumes of dishes built on eggs, cheese, pulses and fruit. A dessert like this one shows the economy of the genre: three ingredients, no dairy, no eggs, and sweetening from maple rather than cane sugar, which was itself the object of voluntary conservation and, late in the war, of certificate and allotment schemes, and urged upon households as a patriotic substitution. Maple syrup as a household sweetener has a long history in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, where the sugaring-off season was a fixed point of the rural year, and its pairing with apples is simply the pairing of two things a New England kitchen had on hand. Poaching whole pared fruit in a sweet liquid is much older than either, a European technique carried into American cookery well before this book was written.