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Apples
Wash the apples in cold water, soak over night and cook in the water in which they were soaked. Boil slowly for ten minutes, adding sugar, lemon and spices to taste. Place in cooker for six hours.
The soaking overnight is the tell: these are dried apples, not fresh ones, which is why they need rehydrating before they see the stove. The recipe is written for a fireless cooker, an insulated box that holds food hot without fuel.
- Which applesFresh apples would collapse to sauce over six hours; the overnight soak points to dried apple rings or quarters. As a rough working ratio, about 1 lb dried apples to 6 cups water, though the recipe gives no quantities and the yield will depend on how far the fruit swells.
- Save the soaking waterThe instruction to cook in the soaking water is deliberate. Dried fruit leaches sugar and flavour into it overnight, and pouring it off leaves the apples flat.
- What a fireless cooker isA wooden or metal chest packed with hay, felt or asbestos, sometimes with a preheated soapstone disc. Food was brought to the boil on the range, then sealed in to coast down over hours. A heavy Dutch oven wrapped in towels inside a cooler works on the same principle; a slow cooker on low will give a similar result, though it supplies heat rather than merely holding it.
- The ten minutes mattersThe stovetop boil is not a formality. It is where the mass gets thoroughly hot; the cooker only holds heat, it does not add any. Skimp the boil and the contents will simply be lukewarm by the end of the hold.
- Six hours is for texture, not donenessRehydrated apples are tender in well under an hour of simmering. The long hold is what turns them dark, thick and almost jammy, closer to apple butter than to stewed fruit. Two to three hours gives a lighter result if that suits better.
- Sugar, lemon and spices to tasteA reasonable starting point is 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar, the juice and a strip of peel from one lemon, and a stick of cinnamon with two or three cloves. Add sugar with the fruit rather than at the end so it has time to penetrate.
- ServingGood warm with cream, or cold alongside roast pork or ham. It keeps a week refrigerated and thickens further as it sits.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between roughly 1900 and the First World War, promoted in cookbooks and by extension services as a way to save coal, save the cook's attention, and keep a summer kitchen from becoming unbearable. The principle is ancient — the Norwegian hay box is the usual ancestor cited — but the commercially made insulated cookers of the period, some with soapstone heat discs, gave it a brief patent-era respectability. Dried apples were the natural candidate: cheap, shelf-stable, present in every pantry that had a fall harvest and a drying rack, and forgiving of the long unattended hold. A section like this in a loose-leaf cook book of the era offered the housekeeper a way to get a dish onto the table without standing over it.