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Apples Baked with Bread
Remove the cores from good-sized apples; fill with jam and butter or butter substitute. Place round slices of stale bread in a baking-dish and put an apple on each. Pour scalded milk and water over the bread. Bake until the apples are soft. Serve in the baking-dish.
A thrifty baked apple set on stale bread that soaks up the milk and turns into a soft pudding layer underneath. The original gives neither oven temperature nor quantities, so the notes below fill the gaps.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. Whole cored apples take 40 to 60 minutes depending on variety and size; they are done when a knife slides through the shoulder without resistance.
- The liquid is the hingePour only enough scalded milk and water to wet the bread and come a little way up the dish, roughly a cup for four apples. Too much and the slices dissolve into soup instead of setting into a custardy base.
- Milk and water proportionsThe original does not specify a ratio. Half and half is a reasonable reading; whole milk alone gives a richer result.
- Choosing applesUse a variety that holds its shape rather than collapsing to sauce. Braeburn, Jonagold, Granny Smith or Rome all work; a Bramley or other cooking apple will burst and flood the bread.
- Filling quantitiesAbout a teaspoon of jam and a small knob of butter per apple is enough. More jam runs out over the sides and scorches on the dish before the fruit is soft.
- Butter substituteThe phrase meant margarine or vegetable shortening. Butter is fine now; a firm margarine behaves the same way here.
- BreadStale means dry and firm, not merely a day old. Cut slices about half an inch thick from a plain white loaf and, if the bread is fresh, dry it in a low oven first so it absorbs rather than disintegrates.
- ScaldingBring the milk and water just to the point where bubbles form at the edge, then pour it over. Scalding is usually explained as a precaution from the days of unpasteurised milk; hot liquid is in any case taken up by the bread more quickly.
- YieldOne apple per person. A shallow dish that holds the apples without crowding gives the best browning on the exposed bread edges.
Baked apples set over bread belong to a long family of English and French household puddings built on stale loaves — charlotte, pain perdu, bread pudding — in which yesterday's bread is the structure and the fruit the flavour. The instruction to serve in the baking dish is practical rather than rustic: the bread will not lift out intact. The offer of a butter substitute in the same breath as butter was a common cookbook habit at times when household fats were expensive or scarce.