No. 587

Apple Sauce

Sauce aux Pommes

Apple Sauce.—Peel a pound of sound apples, suppress the cores and seeds and place them in a saucepan with a little water; when cooked drain and press through a sieve; reduce and add a little brown sugar and the juice of two oranges and their finely shredded peels that have been previously cooked in salted water.

← No. 586 Shrimp Butter Cold Sauces No. 588 Chantilly Apple Sauce with Horseradish a la →

For the Modern Kitchen

A short, sharp apple sauce built for roast pork, duck or goose rather than for a dessert plate. The orange peel does the real work, so treat it as an ingredient and not a garnish.

Apple choiceA pound of apples is about three medium fruit and yields roughly a cup of finished sauce, enough for four. Use a variety that collapses — Bramley, McIntosh, Golden Delicious — since Ranhofer expects them to break down and go through a sieve.
"Suppress the cores"A literal translation of the French supprimer: simply remove and discard them. Quarter and core the peeled apples before they go in the pan.
A little waterTwo or three tablespoons is plenty in a covered pan over low heat. The apples release their own moisture, and the sauce is reduced afterward anyway, so more water only means more boiling down.
The peel is blanched, not rawThe shredded zest must be cooked in salted water first — this is the hinge of the recipe. Cut the peel in fine julienne with no pith, blanch two or three minutes, drain, and only then add it. Raw zest stirred in at the end tastes resinous and bitter.
Sieve or food millA drum sieve or a food mill gives the smooth texture intended. A blender makes it gluey; a potato masher leaves it rustic, which is fine but is not what the book describes.
Brown sugar and orange juiceStart with a tablespoon of brown sugar and the juice of one orange, then taste. Two large modern oranges can easily drown a pound of apples, so add the second only if the sauce needs it.
ReducingReduce over moderate heat after sieving, stirring, until the sauce mounds on a spoon rather than spreading. Add the juice near the end so the fresh orange flavor is not cooked flat.
ServingFiled among the cold sauces, so cool it and serve at room temperature or chilled. It keeps four or five days refrigerated and thickens as it sits.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, gives apple sauce a French title and a French treatment: sauce aux pommes is set among the cold sauces alongside shrimp butter and horseradish preparations, as one of the standing accompaniments to roast meat rather than a nursery dish. Plain apple sauce with pork is far older than the book and common across northern Europe, where the fruit's acidity was valued as a foil to fat; the orange juice and blanched julienne of peel are the restaurant refinement, arguably akin to the classic bigarade and other orange sauces served with duck. The instruction to cook the peel in salted water reflects a period practice of drawing bitterness from citrus rind, a step that survives in candied peel. The book's numbered organization — 587 here, sitting between 586 and 588 — allows a kitchen to cross-reference components, and it makes The Epicurean read more like a professional manual than a household cookbook.