Black Caps
Pare and core tart apples with apple-corer, fill the center with sugar, stick four cloves in the top of each, and bake in deep pieplates, with a little water.
A stripped-down baked apple. The original assumes a hot wood-fired oven and gives no temperature, time or quantity, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- OvenBake at 375F. The original gives no temperature; the name presumably refers to the sugared, clove-studded tops darkening, which wants real heat rather than a slow oven.
- TimingForty to fifty minutes for medium apples, until a knife slides in with no resistance. The skinless fruit softens faster than a whole baked apple, so check at thirty-five.
- Apples"Tart" means a sour apple; for this dish one that holds its shape works best -- Northern Spy, Newtown Pippin, or the modern Granny Smith or Braeburn. Softer eating apples such as McIntosh are likelier to slump into sauce.
- PieplatesNineteenth-century pieplate sizes varied. A modern 9-inch pie dish, or any shallow baking dish that holds the apples upright without crowding, works; leave a finger's width between them so the tops brown rather than steam.
- Water"A little water" means about a quarter inch in the bottom of the dish. It keeps the sugar syrup from burning onto the plate, and should be replenished if it cooks dry before the apples are tender.
- Sugar and clovesFigure a tablespoon or so of sugar per apple, depending on how much the cored cavity takes. Whole cloves are potent -- four per apple is aggressive by current taste, and two is plenty unless you want the flavour forward.
- YieldOne apple per person, served warm with cream, or cold.
"Black caps" was a common nineteenth-century name for apples baked until the tops blackened, and the phrase turns up in English and American cookery books through the 1800s, often for apples baked in their skins with sugar until the crowns caught. The confusing part for modern readers is that the same term was also used for the black raspberry -- names travelled loosely before standardised cookbooks. The appeal of the dish is plain enough: it needed nothing but fruit, sugar, a few cloves from the spice box and space in an oven already hot from something else.