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Apples Baked with Bread
Remove the cores from good-sized apples; fill with jam and butter or butter substitute. Place round slices of stale bread in a baking-dish and put an apple on each. Pour scalded milk and water over the bread. Bake until the apples are soft. Serve in the baking-dish.
A frugal baked pudding with no quantities at all — the amounts follow from the size of your dish. Treat the bread as the base of a bread pudding and the apples as the topping.
- ProportionsFor four apples use four slices of stale bread about 3/4 inch thick, cut into rounds roughly the diameter of the apples, and about 1 to 1 1/2 cups of liquid — enough to soak the bread thoroughly without floating it. A tablespoon of jam and a teaspoon of butter fills each core cavity.
- Scalded milk and waterScalding means heating to just below the boil, around 180F, which was originally done to kill off souring organisms in raw milk. With pasteurised milk it is no longer necessary, though warm liquid does start the bread softening. No ratio is given; equal parts milk and water is a reasonable reading.
- Oven and timingThe book gives none. Bake at 350F for 45 to 60 minutes, depending on the variety and size of apple; they are done when a skewer meets no resistance at the centre and the skins have split.
- Butter substituteThis means margarine or vegetable shortening. The phrase recurs throughout this book, probably reflecting a period when butter was scarce or costly. Either works, as does butter.
- Choosing applesUse a variety that holds its shape rather than collapsing — Braeburn, Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Cored but unpeeled apples keep upright; scoring the skin once around the equator stops it bursting untidily.
- CoringCut the core out from the stem end and stop short of the base, leaving a closed cup. An apple corer pushed straight through drains the jam into the bread below.
- The bread mattersStale bread is not a compromise here. Fresh crumb turns to paste under scalded milk, while day-old bread absorbs the liquid and sets into something custard-like under the apple.
- ServingFour apples serves four, warm, from the dish as directed. A spoonful of cream or a dusting of sugar over the apples before baking both suit it; the recipe as written is quite plain.
This sits in a French section, and it belongs to the same thrifty family as pain perdu and the charlotte — dishes built on the principle that stale bread soaked in milk is an asset rather than a scrap. Baked apples were domestic everywhere in Europe and America, but setting them on bread rounds to catch the juices is the touch that turns two leftovers into a pudding. The phrase "butter or butter substitute" is repeated throughout this Butterick collection. Butterick was a pattern company, and its household books were presumably aimed at much the same readers as its dress patterns: women running a house on a fixed budget, for whom a recipe that used up the end of a loaf and a jar of jam needed no further justification.