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Oatmeal Mush with Apples
Core apples, leaving large cavities; pare, and cook until soft in syrup made by boiling sugar and water together, allowing one cup sugar to one and one-half cups water. Fill cavities with oatmeal mush; serve with sugar and cream. The syrup should be saved and re-used. Berries, sliced bananas, or sliced peaches, are acceptably served with any breakfast cereal.
A breakfast dish that assumes you already have a pot of oatmeal on the stove. The only real technique is poaching the apples so they hold their shape while the centers soften.
- Oatmeal mush"Mush" in Farmer means cereal cooked to a thick, spoonable porridge, not a loose gruel. Steel-cut oats cooked 30-40 minutes give the firmest filling; rolled oats work but should be cooked stiff, roughly 3 parts water to 1 part oats rather than the usual 4.
- The syrupOne cup sugar to one and a half cups water is a light poaching syrup, roughly 40 percent sugar by volume (nearer a third by weight). Bring it to a boil to dissolve, then poach at a bare simmer — a hard boil will break the apples apart before the centers are done.
- Choosing applesUse a firm variety that holds together: Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Northern Spy, Granny Smith. Softer supermarket apples collapse in syrup within a few minutes.
- TimingThe original gives none. Medium apples, cored and pared, take 12-20 minutes at a simmer, turning once. Test with a skewer at the thickest part of the wall; they should yield with slight resistance, since they will continue to soften off the heat.
- CoringAn apple corer plus a melon baller gives the "large cavity" wanted here. Leave at least half an inch of flesh at the bottom so the mush does not leak out.
- Saving the syrupThe recipe itself tells you to keep it, but it will have picked up apple juice and should be refrigerated in a covered jar. Reboil before the next use and discard if it turns cloudy or smells fermented.
- Yield and servingOne apple per person, filled while both apple and mush are still warm. Sugar and cream at the table; the syrup can be spooned over instead if you want it less rich.
Fannie Farmer's cereal chapter reflects a period when hot grain porridge was a mainstay of the American breakfast, promoted by physicians and domestic scientists alike as cheap, filling and easy to digest. The Boston Cooking School taught long, gentle cooking of cereals in double boilers, and a chapter like this one offers variety on a single theme: the same oatmeal appears plain, molded, fried in slices, and here dressed up inside a poached apple. Poaching fruit in light sugar syrup — the technique behind stewed pears, compotes and preserved peaches — was a familiar skill in well-equipped kitchens of the period, and the instruction to save and reuse the syrup is characteristic of the book's steady attention to household thrift. The closing note about berries, bananas and peaches suggests that rail shipping and the banana trade had made such fruit a plausible breakfast garnish in northern cities, though berries and peaches remained seasonal.