Home › Candies › Baked Sour Apples
Baked Sour Apples
Follow the same directions as for sweet apples, using one teaspoon of sugar in each cavity and basting the apples occasionally while baking. These require from one half to two hours.
A fragment that depends on the entry above it: core the apples, stand them in a shallow dish with a little water, and bake. The only variables here are the spoon of sugar and the basting.
- It refers back to another recipeThe "same directions" are those for sweet apples, which are not reproduced here; on the usual pattern that means whole apples, cored, set in a baking dish with a little water. Nothing in this entry tells you the oven heat, so treat the base method as the recipe and this as the variation.
- Oven heatThe entry gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, works in a modern kitchen; hotter and the skins split and the sugar in the cavity scorches before the flesh softens.
- "Sour apples"Period shorthand for tart cooking varieties -- Greening, Baldwin, Northern Spy, Winesap. Modern equivalents are Bramley, Granny Smith, Braeburn or a good Rome. A sweet supermarket eating apple will collapse into sauce and taste flat with only a teaspoon of sugar.
- A teaspoon of sugar is not muchThe point of the dish is tartness, and the sugar mainly draws juice rather than sweetening through. If you want a dessert rather than a side dish, use a tablespoon.
- Basting liquidYou cannot baste without something to baste with. Add water to a depth of about a quarter inch before the apples go in, and spoon the syrup that forms over them every fifteen minutes or so. It is what gives the skins their gloss.
- The timing rangeHalf an hour to two hours reflects wood- and coal-fired ovens and a wide spread of apple sizes and densities. In a modern oven at 350F, medium apples take 45 to 60 minutes. They are done when a skewer meets no resistance at the centre and the skin has begun to wrinkle, not when the clock says so.
- Yield and servingOne apple per person. Nothing in the entry specifies an accompaniment.
Baked apples were among the least troublesome sweets in an American household kitchen: no pastry, no beating, and they could go in beside or after the bread while the oven was still holding heat. The distinction drawn between sweet and sour apples reflects an orchard economy that has largely disappeared -- households bought or grew apples by the barrel and knew that a Greening or a Spy would hold its shape under long heat while a soft sweet apple would not. The word "sour" here is descriptive, not a complaint; tart apples were the preferred cooking fruit, and the single teaspoon of sugar shows how little sweetening was thought necessary.