Home › Candies › Spiced Apple Sauce
Spiced Apple Sauce
Pare, cut into quarters and core a dozen medium sized sour apples. Place in a saucepan sprinkle with one cup of brown sugar, add a dozen cloves and just enough water to prevent the apples from burning. Cook slowly until tender and either crush to a pulp or press through a sieve.
A plain stovetop apple sauce with cloves and brown sugar. It needs almost nothing changed, but a few of the original's assumptions are worth spelling out.
- Water, and why so little"Just enough water to prevent the apples from burning" means roughly 1/4 to 1/2 cup in a heavy pan, no more. Apples release a great deal of liquid as they soften, and starting wet gives a thin sauce you then have to boil down.
- Sour applesThe recipe wants a tart cooking apple that breaks down: Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy, McIntosh. Modern dessert apples such as Gala or Fuji are sweeter and hold their shape, so the sugar should be cut back and the cooking extended.
- The clovesA dozen whole cloves in twelve apples is assertive by current taste. Whole cloves are also easy to lose in the pulp; tie them in muslin or a tea ball, or fish them out before crushing, unless you are pressing through a sieve, which strains them out for you.
- YieldA dozen medium apples is about 4 lb and gives roughly 5 to 6 cups of sauce, enough for six to eight servings alongside pork or goose.
- Sieve or crushPressing through a sieve gives a smooth sauce; crushing with a spoon or potato masher leaves it rustic. The recipe treats the two as equal alternatives. A food mill does the sieve's work in a fraction of the time and catches any stray clove.
- Heat and timingSlow means slow: a bare simmer, covered, for 20 to 30 minutes, stirred now and then. Hard boiling scorches the sugar at the base of the pan before the fruit has collapsed.
- Keeping itThe recipe gives no preserving instructions, and there are not enough sugar or acid measurements here to treat it as one. Refrigerate and use within a week, or freeze; do not water-bath this as written.
Apple sauce belongs to the oldest layer of English and American home cooking, where a barrel of apples in the cellar was a winter's worth of fruit and the sauce was made in quantity to eat with pork, goose and boiled dinners rather than as a dessert. The clove is the period marker: whole spices were bought sparingly and used whole, and clove is one of the spices often paired with apple in Anglo-American kitchens. The recipe itself is a sauce, not a confection. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published its cook book as part of a broad line of domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its sewing patterns, and the terse, assume-nothing-fancy style here is typical of the whole volume.