Baked Apples
Cut out the blossoms and stems of tart apples, in the stem end put some sugar; bake till soft; serve either warm or cold. Sweet apples require a longer time for baking than sour, and are better for adding a little water in pan when placed to bake. They require several hours, and when done are of a rich, dark brown color. If taken out too soon they are insipid. For an extra nice dish, pare and core tart apples, place in pan, put butter and sugar in cavity, and sprinkle cinnamon over them, and serve warm with cream or milk. Or, pare and quarter tart apples, put a layer in earthen baking-dish, add lumps of butter, and sprinkle with cinnamon, then a layer of apples, etc., till dish is full; bake till soft. Or, quarter and core sour apples without paring, put in baking-dish, sprinkle with sugar and bits of butter, add a little water, and bake until tender. The proportion of sugar is a gill, and butter half-size of an egg, to three pints of apples, and a gill and a half of water.
Four variations on the same idea, with the proportions tucked into the last sentence. The oven temperature is never given, which is normal for a book written for cooks who judged a range by hand.
- The measurementsA gill is half a cup, so the sweetened-and-buttered version runs half a cup of sugar and three-quarters of a cup of water to three pints of prepared apples — call it 2 lb, or six or so medium fruit. Butter "half-size of an egg" is about 1 oz, two tablespoons.
- Oven and timeThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, works for all four versions. Cored whole apples take roughly 35-50 minutes depending on size and variety; the quartered versions are usually soft in 25-35.
- The several hours are not a mistakeThe long bake applies to sweet apples only, and it is doing something specific: slow heat caramelises their sugars to that "rich, dark brown" and concentrates the flesh. In a slow oven a sweet apple may well take two hours or more. Pulled early it tastes of nothing, which is the "insipid" the book warns about.
- Choosing apples"Tart" and "sour" here mean cooking apples: Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Winesap hold their shape; Bramley cooks down to a fluff. Red Delicious and similar modern dessert apples tend to go woolly.
- Score the skinFor the whole baked apples, run a knife around the equator through the skin only. Otherwise the skin splits where it likes and the fruit slumps.
- Earthen baking-dishAny ceramic or glass dish. The point is that earthenware heats gently and does not react with the fruit acid, which cast iron and bare aluminium will.
- CreamNineteenth-century cream was unhomogenised and thick. Pouring cream or half-and-half is closer than whipping cream, which is richer than intended.
- YieldThree pints of apples serves four to six as a dessert or breakfast dish.
Baked apples belong to the class of dishes that barely needed a recipe — fruit, an oven going anyway, and whatever sugar the household could spare. That The Dixie Cook Book prints four versions anyway may suggest something about how compilers of the 1880s worked, though the inference rests on the layout of a single paragraph: variations seem to have been gathered from contributors and set end to end. The distinction the entry draws between sweet and sour apples was a live one in a period when most households cooked from a home orchard or a barrel bought by the bushel, and knew their varieties by name and behaviour rather than by a supermarket label. Apples stored well in a cool cellar through winter, which is why they dominate the fruit chapters of American cookbooks of the era while more perishable fruit appears mainly preserved.