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Baked Sweet Apples
Select sound, sweet apples. Core and place one-half teaspoon of sugar in each cavity. Place in a graniteware baking-dish, pour in boiling water to the depth of a quarter of an inch and bake in a moderately hot oven. Sweet apples require two or three hours baking. They should be cookea until perfectly soft and until the juice which oozes out, becomes gelatinous.
A minimal recipe that depends entirely on a kind of apple most markets no longer carry. The long bake is not a mistake — it is what turns the juice syrupy.
- "Sweet apples" means a specific typeNineteenth-century cookbooks commonly divided apples into sweet and sour (acid) varieties. Sweet apples such as Tolman Sweet, Sweet Bough and Pumpkin Sweet were low in acid, dense, and slow to break down. Most apples sold today would count as acid by that standard; a Golden Delicious, Braeburn or Rome will generally soften in about an hour, and may go to pieces well before three hours.
- Oven temperature"Moderately hot" in this period is about 375-400F. If you are baking ordinary modern apples rather than true sweet varieties, 350F gives you more control over the collapse.
- The point of the long bakeThe instruction that matters is the last one: cook until the escaping juice turns gelatinous. That syrupy set is pectin and sugar concentrating in the shallow water at the bottom of the dish, and it is the whole reward of the dish. Judge by the syrup, not by the clock.
- GranitewareEnamelled sheet steel, common in period kitchens because it did not react with fruit acid. Any glass, ceramic or enamelled baking dish does the same job. Avoid bare aluminium or cast iron for long contact with apple juice.
- The quarter-inch of waterNot much, and it will cook away over a long bake. Check every 40 minutes or so and add a little boiling water if the dish threatens to go dry, or the syrup scorches instead of setting.
- SugarHalf a teaspoon per apple is very little, and low-acid sweet varieties would have needed hardly any. With modern tart apples, a full teaspoon per cavity may come closer to the original effect.
- Yield and servingOne apple per person, warm or cold, with the pan syrup spooned over. Cream is a natural accompaniment, though the recipe itself says nothing about serving.
- Filed under CandiesAn odd placement (see below), but do not expect a confection. This is a baked fruit dessert.
Butterick's decision to file baked sweet apples among the candies might be read as reflecting an older, looser sense of what a sweet was: fruit reduced until its own sugar and pectin set into something syrupy belonged with confectionery as readily as with puddings. The recipe also records a loss. American orchards of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries grew a large class of low-acid "sweet apples" — Pumpkin Sweet and dozens of local strains — sweet and dense raw. Commercial apple growing in the twentieth century narrowed to a handful of crisp, acidic dessert varieties that ship well, and the sweet apples largely disappeared from markets, surviving mainly in heritage orchards. A recipe that once needed no explanation now needs a note on what an apple used to be.