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Baked Stuffed Apples
6 large tart red apples
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup chopped bananas
Chopped nut-meats
1 cup chopped cranberries
Whipped cream
1 cup sugar
Cut off the stem end of the apples, but do not peel them. Remove all the core and part of the pulp, leaving the walls of the cup about three-fourths inch thick. Mix bananas, cranberries, sugar, and cinnamon . Fill the cavities in the apples with this mixture, cover with chopped nut-meats, and bake in the oven until tender.
Serve cold with a spoonful of whipped cream on top of each apple.
A stuffed baked apple with a cranberry-banana filling, written in the shorthand of a period when "bake until tender" was thought sufficient direction. A few numbers fill the gaps.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F for 40 to 55 minutes, depending on the size and variety of the apples. They are done when a knife slides into the wall without resistance but the fruit still holds its shape.
- Choose the apple for structure"Large tart red" in a period American cookbook would likely have meant a variety such as Jonathan or Baldwin. Rome Beauty is the variety usually recommended for holding its shape when baked. Avoid Red Delicious, which turns mealy.
- Hollowing the cupThree-quarters of an inch of wall is genuinely the right thickness ", A melon baller or grapefruit spoon is faster than a corer for taking out the surrounding pulp. Do not cut through the blossom end or the filling leaks out.
- Score the skinThe recipe does not say to, but running a shallow cut around the equator of each apple keeps the skin from splitting and sliding off as the flesh swells.
- Liquid in the panNo pan liquid is specified. Add about a quarter inch of water to the baking dish; without it the bottoms scorch before the walls soften.
- The cranberriesThe filling is raw chopped cranberries sweetened with a full cup of sugar for six apples, a generous ratio against the fruit. Taste the mixture before filling and adjust.
- Bananas will darkenChopped banana browns on contact with air and again in the oven. Mix it in last, immediately before filling, and expect the filling to bake to a dull rose rather than anything bright.
- Nuts on topBare chopped nuts sitting on the surface for the better part of an hour will burn. Add them for the last 15 minutes, or toss them with a little butter first.
- Yield and servingSix apples, one per person. They are served cold, so bake them well ahead; the whipped cream goes on at the table, not before.
Baked apples are among the oldest sweet dishes in English and American cookery, needing nothing but fruit, sugar and a fading oven, and they survived into the twentieth century because they used up storage apples in late winter. What dates this version is the filling: fresh cranberries and bananas together in a home kitchen in the 1920s, the bananas arriving by refrigerated steamer from Central America and the cranberries shipped from bogs that by this period included Massachusetts, New Jersey and Wisconsin. The Butterick Publishing Company was a pattern and magazine house rather than a culinary one, and its recipe collections are often said to have been aimed at the same middle-class homemaker who bought its dress patterns — hence a dessert that looks impressive on the plate, costs little, and can be made the day before.