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Apples à L'Americaine (These are dried by taking some)
1165. These are dried by taking some baking apples, paring and coring them, and cutting all up into thin slices, which are threaded upon string, and hung in dry airy places, where they soon get perfectly dry, and are used for sauces, &c., by dressing them in syrup.
A one-sentence method for air-dried apple rings, of the kind that hung on strings above American kitchen hearths. The only real difficulty is getting the slices dry enough, fast enough, that they do not mould on the string.
- Baking applesThis means a firm, tart cooking variety that holds its shape — Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Soft eating apples collapse into leather with no texture and dry unevenly.
- Slice thickness"Thin slices" here means rings of about 1/8 to 1/4 inch, cored so each is a ring that can be threaded. Anything thicker holds moisture at the centre and is where spoilage starts.
- Dry airy placesThe method depends on warm, moving, low-humidity air. Many modern homes cannot supply it, and in damp still air the fruit may mould before it dries. A dehydrator at 135F for 6-10 hours, or an oven on its lowest setting with the door propped, does the same job more reliably.
- Testing for drynessProperly dried rings are leathery and pliable with no bead of moisture when torn, not crisp. Cool them fully before judging, since warm fruit always feels softer than it is.
- BrowningUntreated slices go deep tan. A ten-minute soak in water acidulated with lemon juice before threading keeps them pale; sulphuring, used in nineteenth-century fruit-drying on a larger scale, is not worth reviving domestically.
- Dressing them in syrupThe finishing step the recipe skips over: cover the dried rings with water or cider, simmer gently 20-30 minutes until plump, then add sugar to taste and reduce. Adding the sugar first keeps the fruit tough.
- Yield and storageAbout 3 lb of fresh apples gives roughly 8 oz dried. Condition the finished rings in a loosely closed jar for a week, shaking daily, and repack if any moisture beads on the glass; stored airtight in the dark they keep six months to a year.
Drying apples on strings was ordinary American farm practice well before this book recorded it — the Pennsylvania German term schnitz, for cut apple slices, is the best-known survival of it, and dried apples were a standard winter store across the eastern states. What is telling is that the method is filed under "à l'Américaine," as a foreign import, when English households had other ways of keeping fruit — apples stored whole in a cool loft or fruit room. The phrase "dressing them in syrup" fits the recipe's own "used for sauces, &c.": stewed apple sauce, or a filling for pies, made from fruit picked months earlier.