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Delicious Apples Baked
Apples Apricot Marmalade Pare and core tart apples. Fill centers with apricot marmalade. Bake in covered dish.
A three-line recipe that assumes the cook already knows how baked apples behave. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the liquid, and how long to leave them covered.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Baked apples want a moderate oven, around 350F; timing depends on size and variety, and since these apples are pared they will soften faster than unpeeled ones.
- Covered dishThe lid is doing real work here: it traps steam so the apples cook through without the exposed marmalade scorching. Foil over a baking dish does the same job if you have no lidded casserole.
- A little liquidThe recipe calls for none. A few spoonfuls of water in the bottom of the dish — about a quarter inch — is common modern practice: it keeps the fruit from catching and gives you a syrup to spoon over at the table.
- Tart applesThe instruction matters because the filling is already sweet. Firm tart varieties such as Granny Smith or Northern Spy hold their shape; Bramleys, though tart, cook down to a purée, and Red Delicious tends to go mealy.
- CoringCore from the stem end but stop short of the base, leaving a plug of flesh so the marmalade does not run out into the dish.
- Apricot marmaladeIn this period the word covers a thick apricot preserve, closer to what is sold now as apricot jam or conserve than to the shred-laden citrus marmalade. Any stiff apricot jam works; loose ones will weep.
- Yield and servingOne apple per person, served warm with cream or a spoonful of the pan syrup.
Baked apples asked little of a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century kitchen: a fruit that arrives with its own baking dish, needing no pastry and no custard. Filling the core with preserve rather than sugar and butter is the variation here. The book's placement of the recipe under "Honey, Ices and Gelatines" suggests such compilations were organised loosely, with sweets swept together rather than sorted by method. The Bride's Cook Book belongs to a long line of volumes given to new wives, and the brevity of an entry like this one assumes the reader knows what a covered dish and a moderate oven mean without being told.