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Apple Sauce
Wipe, pare and quarter sour apples; remove seeds and core; put into saucepan and add cold water to almost cover. Cook slowly until soft. Add about 1/2 cup sugar for each quart of apples. Cook a few minutes longer; remove from fire; add little lemon peel and serve either hot or cold.
Royal Baking Powder is Absolutely Pure
A bare-bones apple sauce that assumes a cook who knows what apples look like when they collapse. The only real decisions are the variety and how much water goes in.
- Sour applesThis means a tart cooking apple with enough acid to hold its flavor against sugar — Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening. Sweet dessert apples like Fuji or Gala give a flat, cloying sauce and need almost no sugar at all.
- Water level"Almost cover" is more water than most modern recipes use, and it produces a loose sauce. Half an inch in the bottom of the pan is enough if you keep the lid on and the heat low; the apples release plenty of their own juice.
- Sugar by the quartA quart of quartered apples is roughly a pound and a quarter to a pound and a half of fruit, three or four medium apples. Half a cup of sugar to that is on the sweet side for a tart variety and can be cut by half; add it after the fruit is soft, as the recipe says, since sugar added early keeps the pieces firm.
- Cook slowlyLow heat and a lid, 15 to 25 minutes depending on the variety. Apples scorch on the bottom of the pan quickly once the water goes, so stir and check rather than trusting a timer.
- TextureThe recipe says nothing about mashing or straining; left alone the quarters simply collapse and can be broken up with a spoon. For a smooth sauce, put it through a food mill or sieve, which also removes any skin if you chose not to pare.
- Lemon peel"A little" means a few wide strips of zest with no pith, stirred in off the heat and fished out before serving, or a teaspoon of finely grated zest left in. Add it at the end — long cooking turns citrus peel bitter.
- YieldA quart of prepared apples cooks down to about 2½ to 3 cups of sauce, serving four to six as an accompaniment. It keeps a week refrigerated.
In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American kitchens apple sauce was a standard partner to pork and to fried cakes, both rich enough to want something sharp beside them. The instruction to use sour apples reflects an orchard economy that modern supermarkets have largely erased — cider and cooking varieties were grown and stored by the barrel specifically because they held up to heat and long keeping, while sweet eating apples were the seasonal treat. The line about Royal Baking Powder being absolutely pure marks this as a promotional cookbook: such books were issued by baking powder companies from the later nineteenth century onward, and their claims of purity were aimed squarely at competitors' alum-based powders during a period of loud public argument over what belonged in leavening. Apple sauce needs no baking powder whatever, which is a fair indication of how completely such books doubled as general household manuals.