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Baked Apples
Wipe and core sour apples. Put in a baking-dish, and fill cavities with sugar and spice. Allow one-half cup sugar and one-fourth teaspoon cinnamon or nutmeg to eight apples. If nutmeg is used, a few drops lemon juice and few gratings from rind of lemon to each apple is an improvement. Cover bottom of dish with boiling water, and bake in a hot oven until soft, basting often with syrup in dish. Serve hot or cold with cream. Many prefer to pare apples before baking. When this is done, core before paring, that fruit may keep in shape. In the fall, when apples are at their best, do not add spices to apples, as their flavor cannot be improved; but towards spring they become somewhat tasteless, and spice is an improvement.
Fannie Farmer's baked apples need almost nothing changed, but the oven instruction and the choice of apple both deserve a number and a name.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 400-425F. At that heat cored apples take roughly 30-45 minutes depending on size and variety; they are done when a skewer meets no resistance at the thickest part.
- "Sour apples"This means a firm, tart cooking apple, not a windfall crab. Farmer names no varieties, but firm American keepers such as Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening or Baldwin would have been the likely choice; Granny Smith or Braeburn stand in well. Avoid Red Delicious and most modern sweet eating apples, which tend to go mealy and lose their shape.
- The sugar per apple is modestHalf a cup of sugar to eight apples is about a tablespoon each, which will not fill the cavity of a large modern apple. Judge by taste rather than filling the hole to the brim.
- Core before paringThis is the instruction that matters. Coring an already-peeled apple tears the flesh and the fruit splits open in the oven. Push the corer through the intact apple first, then peel if you want a peeled apple.
- Water in the dishA quarter inch of boiling water is enough. It keeps the sugar from scorching and gives you the syrup for basting; too much and the apples poach rather than bake.
- BastingEvery ten minutes or so, spooning the pan syrup over the tops. This is what glazes the apples and it is worth the trouble.
- On the seasonal adviceHer note about spring apples reflects cellar storage, not cold rooms. Modern controlled-atmosphere storage keeps apples firmer for far longer, but flavor still fades, so the cinnamon or nutmeg is still the right call for late-season fruit.
- YieldEight apples serves eight as a dessert course. "Cream" here means heavy cream poured over, unwhipped and unsweetened.
Baked apples belong to the oldest layer of English and American home cookery: a whole fruit set in a dish with sugar and put in the falling heat of a bread oven, requiring no pastry, no skill and almost no fuel. Farmer's closing note on autumn versus spring apples is the most useful line on the page: barrel-stored fruit lost acid and aroma through the winter, and spice was frankly a corrective for tiredness rather than an ornament. Her insistence on "sour apples" reflects a nineteenth-century American orchard landscape of hundreds of named varieties.