Iced Apples
Pare and core one dozen large apples, fill with sugar and a little butter and nutmeg; bake until nearly done, let cool, and remove to another plate, if it can be done without breaking them (if not, pour off the juice). Ice tops and sides with caking-ice, and brown lightly; serve with cream. - Mrs. R. C. Carson, Harrisburg.
A baked apple dressed up as a dessert course: whole apples filled with sugar and butter, cloaked in cake icing, and flashed in the oven until the surface takes color. Most of the work is in keeping the apples intact.
- "Caking-ice"This is cake icing, not anything frozen. In a book of this date it means a beaten egg-white icing — whites whipped stiff with powdered sugar, or a boiled sugar syrup beaten into the whites — spread thick enough to hold its shape on a curved surface.
- Oven temperatureBake the filled apples at 350F for roughly 30 to 40 minutes, until a skewer meets slight resistance at the core. They must be underdone: fully soft apples collapse the moment you lift them.
- Browning the icingReturn the iced apples to a hot oven, 425F, for 4 to 6 minutes, or run them under a broiler while watching constantly. The point is surface color only; longer and the icing slumps and the apples finish cooking inside it.
- Choose a firm appleThe recipe says only "large apples," but the dish needs a dense variety that holds its shape. Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Winesap or Braeburn will stand up; Macintosh and most modern eating apples turn to sauce.
- Why the second plate mattersBaking apples throw a good deal of syrup, and egg-white icing dissolves on contact with it. Move the apples to a dry dish, or pour the juice off thoroughly, before icing — this is the instruction the dessert turns on.
- The filling is unmeasuredFigure about a teaspoon of sugar, a small dab of butter and a scrape of nutmeg per apple. The cavity left by coring is the measure; do not pack it, as the sugar liquefies and runs.
- Raw egg whiteA lightly browned meringue does not reach a pasteurizing temperature all the way through. Use pasteurized egg whites, or powdered egg white, if serving anyone who should avoid raw eggs.
- Yield and servingTwelve apples, one apiece, so twelve servings. The cream is meant to be poured — heavy or single cream, unwhipped and unsweetened, since the icing supplies plenty of sugar.
Baked apples with sugar and spice in the core are older than any cookbook that records them, and the trick here is purely one of presentation: a plain nursery dish is given a meringue coat so it can be sent to table as a company dessert. Egg-white icing was the usual finish for cakes through much of the nineteenth century, before butter-based frostings became common, and cooks also used it over pies, puddings and fruit, browned for a moment in a cooling oven. The Dixie Cook Book was assembled from contributions credited to named housekeepers, and this entry carries Mrs. R. C. Carson's name and her town — which is how the book's authority worked: not a professional's method but a neighbor's, vouched for by attribution. The brevity is typical, since the compilers assumed a reader who already knew what cake icing was and how her own stove behaved.