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Baked Sweet Apples
Wipe and core eight sweet apples. Put in a baking-dish, and fill cavities with sugar, allowing one-third cup, or sweeten with molasses. Add two-thirds cup boiling water. Cover, and bake three hours in a slow oven, adding more water if necessary.
A long, slow bake that is closer to confit than to the 45-minute baked apple most cooks know. The point is not tenderness but concentration: three low hours turn the fruit dark, dense and almost caramel-sweet.
- "Slow oven"Somewhere around 275-300F. Period ranges were not calibrated, and "slow" covered a band rather than a point. At that sort of heat the syrup reduces without scorching; much hotter and the apples are likely to burst and collapse before three hours are up.
- Sweet apples specificallyThe recipe calls for a low-acid variety — Tolman Sweet, Pound Sweet and similar apples were common in New England markets and are now largely heirloom orchard fruit. Golden Delicious, Fuji or Gala are the closest supermarket stand-ins; a tart Granny Smith will fall apart and taste thin here.
- Keep them coveredThe lid is the hinge. Three uncovered hours dries the fruit to leather; covered, the apples steam in their own syrup. The recipe says to add more water if necessary, so check the dish periodically.
- AmountsOne-third cup sugar total, divided among the eight cavities — roughly two teaspoons each, not a filled cavity. Two-thirds cup boiling water goes into the dish, not into the apples.
- Molasses as the alternativeUnsulphured molasses is the closer match to what the book means; blackstrap is far more bitter than period molasses and will dominate. The recipe gives no quantity, so work to about the same measure as the sugar it replaces.
- CoringCore from the stem end but stop short of the blossom end so the cavity holds its sugar. Scoring a ring through the skin around the middle keeps the apples from splitting.
- Dish and yieldA covered casserole or a deep baking dish under foil, just large enough that the apples touch. Serves eight, warm or cold, with cream.
Baked sweet apples belong to the New England habit of cooking fruit for a long time in a cooling oven — the residual heat after bread baking is often said to have been put to exactly this use, and three hours is generally taken to be a wood-stove timing rather than a gas-range one. Fannie Farmer's book, first published in 1896 out of the Boston Cooking School, devotes a full section to fruit at a moment when home canning and cold storage were reshaping what a household could keep through the winter, and sweet apples were the cheap, storable end of the apple trade. The distinction the recipe draws between sweet and sour apples was presumably ordinary knowledge then.