Home › Left-Over Cereals › Farina with Baked Apples
Farina with Baked Apples
Wash four or five good baking apples, and with a corer remove all seeds and cores. Place them on an agate baking-pan with a tablespoonful of water on the bottom. Fill the centers with any left-over farina or cream of wheat, and put a small piece of butter on top of each. Sprinkle sugar and a few drops of lemon-juice over all and bake in a moderate oven until apples are soft. Serve hot for breakfast or luncheon.
A straightforward way of using up cold breakfast cereal, and one that still works. The only real decisions are the apple variety and the oven.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F. Baking apples take 35-50 minutes at that temperature depending on size and variety; they are done when a knife slides into the flesh with no resistance.
- Agate baking-panAgate (or agateware) was mottled enamelled steel, the standard cheap bakeware of the period. Any shallow ceramic or metal dish works; enamelled cast iron is the closest modern equivalent.
- Choose apples that hold upFirm baking apples such as Rome Beauty or Braeburn keep their shape. Softer eating apples collapse into sauce around the filling.
- Cold farina packs, warm farina does notLeftover farina or cream of wheat sets stiff in the refrigerator, which is exactly what you want here. Cut it into rough pieces and press it into the cored cavities so it stays put.
- Farina, then and nowFarina is finely milled wheat middlings, sold today mainly as Cream of Wheat. Cooked semolina, cold cooked cracked wheat or even leftover oatmeal substitute directly.
- Water and coveringA single tablespoon of water will boil away long before the apples are soft. Use several tablespoons, and cover loosely with foil for the first half if the filling browns too fast.
- Sugar and lemonAmounts are left to the cook: about a teaspoon of sugar per apple and a squeeze of lemon is enough to make a light syrup in the pan. Baste once or twice with it.
- YieldOne apple per person, so four or five servings as written.
Cookbooks of the early twentieth century devoted whole chapters to leftovers, in what is often said to reflect both the fact that the coal or gas range was lit anyway and a sense of thrift as a moral matter as much as a financial one. Farina was a fixture of the American breakfast table by then, boiled into a porridge and served with milk and sugar; cookbooks of the period commonly directed that leftovers be sliced, fried in butter and eaten as a second meal, so using them as a stuffing is a variation on established practice rather than an invention. Baked apples themselves are much older and appear in English and American household books throughout the nineteenth century, usually cored, sugared and set in a shallow dish with a little water. The combination here is characteristic of the genre: nothing new is bought, the oven does the work, and a dish that would otherwise be scraped into the bin becomes breakfast or a light luncheon.