Home › Fruits: Fresh, Preserved, And Canned › Apple Sauce
Apple Sauce
Wipe, quarter, core, and pare eight sour apples. Make a syrup by boiling seven minutes one cup sugar and one cup water with thin shaving from rind of a lemon. Remove lemon, add enough apples to cover bottom of saucepan, watch carefully during cooking, and remove as soon as soft. Continue until all are cooked. Strain remaining syrup over apples.
This is the dressier of the two standard apple sauces in Farmer — poached quarters held whole in a lemon syrup rather than a pulp cooked to collapse. The syrup does most of the work, so the choice of apple and the discipline of small batches matter more than anything else.
- Sour applesFarmer means a firm, tart cooking apple — Baldwin, Greening, Northern Spy were the New England standards in her day. Granny Smith or Braeburn are good modern substitutes; avoid a variety that breaks down readily (Bramley) or a sweet one such as Gala or Red Delicious, which is likely to soften into sauce and make the syrup cloying.
- Cook in batches, and only one layerThe hinge of the recipe. Crowding the pan drops the syrup temperature and steams the quarters into sauce. One layer at a time, lifted out the moment a skewer meets no resistance, keeps them intact — usually 4 to 8 minutes depending on variety and size.
- The lemon rind"Thin shaving" means peel with none of the white pith, which would make the syrup bitter; a vegetable peeler is the easiest modern way to take it. Note that the recipe has you lift the lemon out before the apples go in, so it flavours the syrup only during the initial seven-minute boil.
- Syrup proportionsOne cup sugar to one cup water boiled seven minutes gives a light syrup. It will reduce further as batch after batch of apples goes through, so top up with a splash of water if it starts to thicken and darken.
- QuantityEight apples is about 3 lb, giving something over 2 lb of prepared quarters. Expect six to eight servings as a dessert or accompaniment. Use a pan wide enough to take a single uncrowded layer of quarters.
- FinishingStrain the syrup over the apples while both are still warm and let them cool in it — they absorb syrup as they cool and the flavour deepens. Serve cold, plain or with cream; it also keeps four or five days covered in the refrigerator.
Farmer gives more than one apple sauce, and the difference between them is the difference between a larder staple and a dessert. The plain sort — apples stewed and sweetened — was a common American accompaniment to pork and to fried salt meats, going back well before the nineteenth century, when apples were the one fruit almost every farmstead had in quantity. This version, with its sugar syrup and lemon peel and the fussy business of poaching a few quarters at a time so they hold their shape, belongs instead to the later nineteenth-century table, where fruit compotes were served in glass dishes at the end of a meal. It suggests what had changed in the Boston kitchen: cheaper refined sugar, imported lemons reaching northern markets in winter, and a cooking-school ethos that treated the careful handling of a common ingredient as a skill worth teaching.