No. 428

Apple Sauces

Sauce aux Pommes

Hot with Butter and Gravy.—Peel a pound of sour apples, cut them in quarter inch thick slices, and remove the cores. Put a quarter of a pound of butter into a sauteing pan and when hot, throw in the apples and let them fry on both sides until they are a fine color, then moisten with four gills of veal blond (No. 423), and two ounces of brown sugar (or cayenne pepper) if preferred, and a little grated nutmeg, press the apples through a sieve and serve hot.

For Hot or Cold.—Peel and core one pound of sour apples, put them into a saucepan with a pint of water and when done, drain and pass them through a sieve; now add sugar, nutmeg, and an ounce of butter and serve the sauce hot; for the cold suppress the butter.

← No. 427 Anchovy Sauces Hot Sauces No. 429 Argentine Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two apple sauces from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen: one enriched with butter and veal stock for roast meats, the other a plain fruit sauce that can go hot or cold. Both are short on modern detail, so a few notes.

GillsA gill is half a cup, so four gills is two cups (about 475 ml) of stock to a pound of apples. That is a generous amount of liquid; the sauce is meant to be sieved smooth and fairly loose, more of a sauce than a purée.
Veal blondNo. 423 in the same book is a light veal stock. Any light, unseasoned veal or chicken stock will stand in. Avoid a reduced dark demi-glace, which will bury the apple.
Sour applesNineteenth-century "sour apples" means a firm cooking variety that collapses cleanly and keeps its acidity: Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Dessert apples such as Gala or Fuji turn sweet and watery and will not carry the butter.
"Two ounces of brown sugar (or cayenne pepper)"Read as an either/or: sweeten with sugar, or take the sauce savoury with cayenne. Two ounces of cayenne would be absurd; the quantity plainly belongs to the sugar, and the cayenne is a pinch. The original is genuinely unclear here.
Frying the applesQuarter-inch slices in a quarter pound of butter want a wide pan and medium heat, turned once. The colour is the point — the browning is what distinguishes this from a plain compote, and it is lost if the slices steam in a crowded pan.
Passing through a sieveA drum sieve and a wooden pestle were the standard professional tools of the period. A food mill on the fine plate gives the same texture with less work; a blender gives a smoother, slicker sauce than intended.
The second sauceA pound of apples in a pint of water, then drained, gives a thick purée. Save a little of the cooking liquid to loosen it. Omitting the butter for the cold version matters — cold butter in a fruit sauce sets waxy on the palate.
YieldThe second, drained version makes roughly a cup and a half; the first, with two cups of stock added, makes appreciably more. Serve alongside roast pork, duck, or goose.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, in two separate stints, across a span of some thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole repertoire in French classical order. Apple sauce is placed between the hot sauces, between anchovy and Argentine, rather than treated as a homely accompaniment. The pairing of tart apple with rich roast meat is far older than the book and common to English, German and French cooking alike; what is characteristic of Ranhofer is the first version, where the apples are browned in butter and let down with veal stock so that the fruit becomes a true sauce in the French sense rather than a condiment set beside the plate. The alternative of cayenne in place of sugar shows the same instinct: the dish is being pulled toward the savoury side of the menu. The second, simpler preparation is essentially the applesauce of the American household, included because a restaurant of that period still had to produce plain things well.