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Fresh Pork with Baked Apples
Mince any remnants of roast pork to make two cupfuls. Season it as needed with salt and a little pepper and moisten with a few spoonfuls of gravy.
Wash half a dozen medium-sized greening apples.
Cut a slice from the stem end, take out all of the core and enough of the apple part to form a neat cup. Put the meat in these, with a small piece of butter on top of each. Place them in an agate baking-pan, add a very little water, and bake until the apples are soft.
A tidy way to use up Sunday's roast: the apple is both container and sauce. The original assumes you know your oven and your apples, so a few numbers help.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, for 30-45 minutes, depending on the size and variety of the apples. They are done when a knife slides into the wall of the cup without resistance but the fruit still holds its shape.
- Greenings"greening" was a general term for a firm, tart green cooking apple; in the northeastern United States it most often meant the Rhode Island Greening, now mostly found at orchards. Granny Smith, Northern Spy or Braeburn behave much the same way. Avoid soft eating apples such as McIntosh, which collapse into sauce before the filling is hot.
- An agate baking-panAgate ware is speckled enamelled steel. Any non-reactive dish works: enamel, glass or stoneware. The point is that the acid in the apples can react with bare cast iron or unlined aluminium and pick up a metallic taste.
- Reheating cooked porkThe pork is already roasted, so this is a reheat rather than a cooking. Bring the filling through to 165F; because the apples insulate it, the meat can lag well behind the fruit. If your roast was very lean, the finished mince can be dry, so be generous with the gravy.
- Moistening"A few spoonfuls of gravy" means roughly 3-4 tablespoons for two cups of mince: enough to bind, not enough to make it wet. Stock with a little of the pork fat works if the gravy is gone.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper is the floor. Sage, thyme, a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of grated onion all suit pork and apple, as does a pinch of dry mustard to cut the sweetness of the baked fruit.
- Water in the pan"A very little" means about a quarter inch, enough to keep the bottoms from scorching and to make steam. Too much and the apples poach and split.
- YieldSix filled apples: a main course for three, or a supper dish for six alongside potatoes and a green vegetable.
Books of this kind belong to a whole genre of American household writing that treated the second appearance of a joint as a matter of economy and pride rather than apology. Pork and apple is often said to be among the older pairings in northern European cooking, the acid of the fruit answering the fat of the meat, and stuffing a hollowed apple seems to have been one way of making a small quantity of meat look like a composed dish. The greening named here points to the northeastern United States, where Rhode Island Greenings were a market staple for pies and baking well into the twentieth century; agate ware, mentioned as casually as we might say sheet pan, was the ordinary enamelled kitchenware of the period. The recipe assumes something a modern reader has to be told: that there was a roast on Sunday, that gravy was kept, and that the cook could judge an oven without a dial.