No. 2992

Apples Baked

Pommes au Four

Use a five-eighth inch tin tube from the column box to core some good russet apples without peeling them: cut off a strip of the peel all around the middle and lay the apples beside each other on a dish fit for the oven, leaving half an inch space between each one. Fill up the hole in the center of each apple with white or brown sugar, and place a little melted butter on the top of them all; pour a little hot water into the bottom of the dish and push the apples into a slack oven for about half an hour. Should the oven be too hot, cover them over with paper. Serve in the same dish they were cooked in.

← No. 2991 Apples a la Nelson Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 2993 Apples, Baron de Brisse Style →

For the Modern Kitchen

A plain baked apple from Ranhofer's The Epicurean, and one of the few recipes in that book a modern cook can follow almost unchanged. Two details matter: the strip of peel removed around the middle, and a genuinely low oven.

The band of peelCutting a strip of skin from around the equator gives the flesh room to swell as it cooks, and is usually explained as a way of keeping the skin from splitting. Ranhofer treats it as a step in the method rather than a garnish.
"Slack oven"A slack or cool oven in this period is generally taken as somewhere in the region of 250-325F; the equivalences are approximate. At that heat half an hour is optimistic for a large apple; check at 30 minutes and expect longer for fruit much over 6 oz.
The paper coverRanhofer's sheet of paper is a loose lid to stop the tops scorching before the centres soften. Foil does the same job; keep it loose so steam escapes.
The coring tubeThe "column box" was a set of round cutters and tubes used for pastry columns and garnishes. A five-eighth inch tube is narrower than most modern apple corers.
RussetsTrue russets are still grown but are a farmers' market item. Any firm baking apple that holds shape will do: Braeburn, Northern Spy, Rome. Avoid Red Delicious, which collapses to wool.
Water in the dishA quarter inch of hot water is enough. It keeps the sugar from burning on the dish and gives a thin syrup to spoon over; too much and the bottoms poach rather than bake.
Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given. Reckon about a tablespoon of sugar and two teaspoons of melted butter per apple, one apple per person.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete professional reference, and its thousand-plus pages of elaborate garnished constructions make a recipe this plain stand out. It sits in a run of apple entremets — Apples à la Nelson before it, Apples Baron de Brisse Style after — where the same fruit is dressed up in progressively grander ways; pommes au four is the baseline the others depart from. The equipment reference gives away the setting: a "column box" of graduated round cutters belongs to a large restaurant kitchen rather than a domestic one, and Ranhofer assumes his reader has one to hand. Baked apples themselves are far older than the book and appear across English and American cookery long before it, which may be why he leaves the quantities to the cook's judgment.