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Bonfire Apples
This is as good fun as a toasted marshmallow party to finish off a picnic supper.
Everybody sharpens a long cook stick and hardens the point by charring it in the fire and then plunging it into cold water, like a blacksmith tempering a horse shoe. Stick a big apple through the stem end and roast it over the coals until skin is ready to peel off. Peel your apple and roll it in a pan of brown sugar. Then hold the sugarcoated Eve-fruit over the coals and turn it slowly until it caramelizes.
I CUP HONEY
A campfire apple on a stick, glazed in brown sugar. The whole thing hinges on coals rather than flame, and on choosing an apple that will not collapse.
- Coals, not flameWait until the bonfire has burned down to a bed of glowing embers with no leaping flame. Over open fire the sugar coating scorches black in seconds while the apple stays raw.
- Choosing the appleA firm variety holds together on the stick — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Jonagold. Soft apples like McIntosh cook to sauce and slide off into the fire.
- The stickCharring the point and quenching it does harden green wood, but use only a hardwood you can identify. Avoid oleander, yew and any unknown shrub; a metal skewer or a long fork is the safer modern choice.
- Through the stem endDrive the stick in at the stem and out through the blossom end so the apple is skewered along its core. Off-center and it will spin loose once the flesh softens.
- TimingThe recipe gives no time; roast until the skin loosens, turning steadily, which will take upwards of fifteen minutes over good coals and longer with a large apple. Peeling a hot apple is awkward; hold it on the stick and lift the skin away with a knife point.
- The sugar rollBrown sugar sticks to a hot, damp surface. Roll immediately after peeling, then return to the coals for only a minute or two — caramel goes from amber to bitter fast, and molten sugar burns skin badly.
- YieldOne apple per person, and count on a second round. Have the pan of sugar, a knife and a plate set out before anyone starts roasting.
Fire-roasted apples are older than any cookbook — apples keep through winter, need no preparation, and cook themselves on the hearth. The setting points to the American outdoor-cookery and camping literature of roughly the early twentieth century, written for scouting troops, summer camps and picnic suppers, which treated cooking over a fire as recreation rather than necessity, though nothing in the text itself fixes a date. The marshmallow-toasting comparison suggests that world, and the "Eve-fruit" flourish is of a piece with dressing plain camp food in playacting language.