Baked Apples
Wash and core and if desired pare the apples. Place them in a shallow baking dish and fill the cavities with sugar, sugar and spice, sugar and seeded raisins, or sugar and chopped nuts. Sprinkle sugar and cinnamon over the apples; cover the bottom of the pan with water and bake about thirty minutes or until tender. Serve with cream or with lemon sauce.
A skeleton recipe of the sort that assumes the cook already knows what a baked apple should look like. Two things it leaves out are worth supplying: the oven temperature and the choice of apple.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Baked apples want a moderate oven, 350-375F. At that heat thirty minutes is optimistic for a whole apple; 40-50 minutes is more usual, and the fruit is done when a skewer meets no resistance at the shoulder.
- Choose the appleA variety that holds its shape is essential or the fruit collapses into sauce around the filling. Rome Beauty was among the apples commonly recommended for baking in this era; Braeburn, Jonagold, Northern Spy or Golden Delicious all work today. Avoid McIntosh.
- Pare or notLeaving the skin on is the better choice for whole baked apples: it acts as a case. If you do pare them, expect them to slump and shorten the baking time accordingly.
- Score the skinNot in the original, but the reason apples burst is trapped steam. A shallow ring cut through the skin around the equator, or around the top, lets them swell without splitting.
- Water in the panAbout a quarter inch is enough. It keeps the sugar that runs out of the cavities from scorching and gives you a thin syrup to spoon over at the table. Add a little more partway through if it dries.
- Amount of sugarUnspecified, as usual in this era. Roughly a tablespoon per cavity, plus whatever raisins or nuts you add; tart apples take more, sweet ones less. A dot of butter in each cavity is a frequent variant elsewhere and improves the syrup, though this recipe does not call for it.
- Lemon sauceNo formula is given. The usual lemon sauce of the period was a boiled pudding sauce: sugar and cornstarch or flour cooked with water, then lemon juice, zest and butter stirred in off the heat. Plain cream is the simpler option the recipe names first.
- YieldOne apple per person. Filled and baked ahead, they are good warm or at room temperature.
Baked apples appear in nearly every American general cookbook from the mid-nineteenth century onward because they cost almost nothing and required no skill beyond having an oven already hot from something else. The stuffing options given here — spice, seeded raisins, chopped nuts — suit the pantry of an American household of the period, when raisins were still commonly sold with the seeds in them and had to be picked over by hand, a chore that faded as seedless varieties took over the trade.