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Spiced Apple Sauce
Wipe, quarter, core, and pare eight sour apples. Put in a saucepan, sprinkle with one cup sugar, add eight cloves, and enough water to prevent apples from burning. Cook to a mush, stirring occasionally.
A plain stovetop apple sauce with the sugar added at the start, which is what makes it a sauce rather than a compote. A few notes on the fruit and the cloves.
- "Sour apples"Fannie Farmer means a tart cooking apple with enough acid to hold its flavor against a cup of sugar. Granny Smith, Bramley, Northern Spy or Rhode Island Greening all work; a modern Gala or Fuji will cook down sweet and flat, and you would want to cut the sugar sharply.
- Sugar quantityOne cup to eight apples is a full cup of sugar for roughly two and a half pounds of fruit, in line with turn-of-the-century sweetness. Half a cup gives a sauce most people now prefer, and you can always stir more in at the end.
- Whole clovesEight whole cloves are plenty for this quantity and they should come out before serving. Tie them in a scrap of cheesecloth or drop them into a tea ball, or you will be fishing for them in the mush.
- "Enough water"Start with a quarter cup in the bottom of the pan. The apples release a good deal of their own liquid once the sugar draws on them, and too much water gives a thin, watery sauce that no amount of further cooking quite recovers.
- Sugar and softeningAdding sugar at the outset may slow the breakdown of the fruit slightly, so "cook to a mush" can take rather longer than unsugared apples would. Stir often once it thickens, since the sugared bottom scorches quickly.
- PanUse a heavy-bottomed non-reactive saucepan. Bare cast iron or unlined copper will react with the apple acid and dull the color.
- YieldAbout three to four cups, serving six as a side dish or accompaniment to pork or roast goose. It keeps several days refrigerated and freezes well.
Apple sauce sweetened and spiced in the pan sits at the boundary between a vegetable-course side dish and a dessert. Farmer's book, first published in 1896, was written for households where apples arrived by the barrel in autumn and had to be used across months; sour, long-keeping varieties like Baldwin, Greening and Northern Spy were standard New England cellar stock, and most of them have since been displaced in supermarkets by sweet dessert apples. The recipe's brevity is characteristic: Farmer's reputation rests on level measurements, but she assumed her readers already knew what a mush of apples looked like.