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Baked Apples
Core and peel some good cooking apples and set them nearly touching each other in a shallow bakingpan; mix a teaspoonful of grated lemon rind with each six teaspoonfuls of sugar requisite, and fill the cavities caused by the removal of the cores, pour in a sufficient quantity of water to cover the bottom of the pan, and bake in a very quick oven until soft, basting frequently with the syrup formed of the water and sugar.
A plain baked apple with a lemon-sugar filling, written for a cook who is expected to judge quantities by eye. Two things need translating: the oven and the fact that these apples are peeled.
- "Very quick oven"Roughly 450F, though period oven descriptions were not standardised and some sources put 'very quick' higher. At that heat peeled apples brown and can collapse quickly, so start checking at 25 minutes; 30-40 minutes is usual for medium apples. A slower 375F for about 45 minutes is a lower-risk alternative if you would rather not watch them.
- Peeled, not just coredWithout skins the apples soften throughout and take on the syrup rather than holding a papery skin, and they are more likely to slump. The recipe's instruction to set them nearly touching may help them keep their shape, though it gives no reason for the spacing.
- Sugar quantityThe recipe fixes only a ratio, one teaspoonful of grated lemon rind to each six teaspoonfuls of sugar, and leaves the total ('requisite') to the cook. If you allow about 2 teaspoons of sugar per cavity, a teaspoon of rind covers roughly three apples. Adjust upward for very tart fruit.
- Choice of apple"good cooking apples" here most likely means firm, acid keepers of the sort then common in New York, such as Northern Spy, Rome Beauty or Baldwin. Among modern supermarket varieties, Granny Smith holds its shape well; Red Delicious tends to go mealy.
- The waterA quarter inch in the pan is enough. Its whole purpose is to dissolve the sugar that runs out and give you something to baste with — too much and you poach rather than bake.
- BastingThis is the hinge. Every 10 minutes, spoon the pan syrup back over the exposed fruit or the peeled surfaces dry and leather. If the syrup reduces to nothing before the apples are soft, add a spoonful of hot water.
- Yield and servingAllow one apple per person. Serve warm with the pan syrup poured over, and cream or a little unsweetened whipped cream alongside.
Baked apples were among the plainest things in Oscar Tschirky's book -- a nursery and boarding-house dessert that appears in a great many nineteenth-century American cookery collections -- and its presence in The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) is a reminder that the volume was written as a general household manual, not a hotel menu. Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, compiled a volume of some nine hundred pages ranging from elaborate service dishes to the plainest domestic economy, and apples were among the fruits most likely to be on hand in quantity through the winter, kept in cellars and barrels. The lemon rind is the one flourish.