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Baked Apples Without Sugar
Apples Lemon Juice Raisins or Dates Core the apples. Fill the centers with raisins or dates that have been stewed in plenty of water for about five minutes.
Sprinkle with lemon juice, and bake slowly. Baste as water boils away, with water drained from raisins.
A sugar-free baked apple that relies entirely on the dried fruit for sweetness. The original gives no quantities, no temperature and no time, so the numbers below are the working ones.
- Oven and time"Bake slowly" is usually taken to mean something in the region of 300-325F. Whole cored apples generally need 45-60 minutes at that heat, depending on size and variety; they are done when a skewer slides through the flesh without resistance but the skin has not collapsed.
- QuantitiesReckon on one apple per person, about 2 tablespoons of stewed raisins or chopped dates per apple, and a teaspoon of lemon juice. A dozen apples will take roughly a cup and a half of dried fruit.
- Choice of appleYou want a variety that holds its shape: Braeburn, Granny Smith, Jonagold, Rome. McIntosh and similar soft apples will burst and turn to sauce, which is fine if that is what you want but is not what the recipe intends.
- Core, do not pierceTake out the core from the stem end and stop short of the base so the cavity holds the fruit and its liquid. An apple corer or a narrow knife and a melon baller both work; scoring a shallow line round the middle of the skin helps prevent splitting.
- The soaking liquid is the pointStewing the raisins five minutes in plenty of water is what makes the dish sweet without sugar, and the strained liquid is the basting syrup. Keep it and use it -- basting with plain water instead gives a noticeably thinner result.
- BastingPour a little of the raisin water into the dish rather than only over the apples, so it does not all evaporate at once. Baste two or three times over the hour; the liquid reduces to a light syrup you can spoon over at the table.
- ServingGood warm, and good the next day cold, when the juices have set slightly. A spoonful of cream or plain yoghurt suits it, though the recipe's point is that it sweetens itself without sugar.
Baked apples are among the oldest English sweet dishes, and turn up in household manuals long before this book. What dates this version is the phrase "without sugar." Cookbooks of the early twentieth century were often assembled as practical primers for new households, and sugar was a bought commodity to be watched, while raisins and other dried fruit could carry the sweetening themselves. Recipes titled "without sugar" also appeared in some numbers in the World War I years, when sugar was subject to conservation campaigns in Britain and the United States -- with formal rationing coming in from early 1918 in Britain -- and cooks were urged to lean on honey, syrup and dried fruit.