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Fried Apples
The apples should be cut into slices unpeeled and fried, a few at a time, in a large fryingpan with enough fat or lard to cover the bottom of the pan. When the slices are brown on one side, turn them over with a knife. Then place in a dripping-pan and put in the oven. If desired the slices of apple may be placed in flour before frying, and if soaked in cognac or rum the result is agreeable.
A skeleton recipe of the kind Oscar wrote for cooks who already knew the work. The gaps worth filling are the apple, the fat, and the oven step, which the original leaves entirely unspecified.
- Which appleSlices are left unpeeled, so the skin has to hold the ring together. A firm, tart variety — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy — keeps its shape; softer supermarket apples collapse into sauce in the pan. Core the slices and cut them about a third of an inch thick.
- The fatLard is the period default and still the best choice for flavour here; bacon fat, clarified butter or a neutral oil all work. Whole butter alone will scorch before the apples colour. Enough to film the bottom of the pan is right — this is a shallow fry, not a deep one.
- A few at a timeThe instruction is the hinge of the recipe. Crowded slices steam in their own juice and never brown. Work in single layers with space between the pieces and accept that a full batch takes several rounds.
- The oven stepNo temperature is given, and the book supplies no oven vocabulary to work from. Around 350F for eight to twelve minutes finishes the interiors after the surfaces have taken colour, and lets the whole batch be held together until service. The dripping-pan is simply a shallow roasting tin.
- The flour optionA light dusting of flour, shaken off, gives a crisper crust and helps the slices brown faster. It also makes them stick more readily, so the pan needs to be properly hot before the apples go in.
- Soaking in spiritHalf an hour in cognac or rum is plenty; longer and the slices soften. Drain and pat them dry before frying, or the alcohol and liquid will spit in the hot fat and stall the browning.
- Yield and useTwo large apples give roughly four servings as a garnish. Fried apples suit pork, ham, goose or calf's liver rather than standing on their own; sugar and cinnamon push them toward dessert if that is what is wanted.
Fried apples belong to the plain end of the Waldorf's repertoire — a farmhouse and boarding-house dish that turns up in hotel cooking as an accompaniment to pork and to breakfast ham. Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) ran to nine hundred-odd pages and mixed grand service dishes with entries exactly this brief, on the assumption that a professional reader needed a reminder rather than a lesson. The unpeeled slice keeps the ring intact through two stages of cooking.