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Baked Apples
Pare as many apples as you wish of some nice variety, neither sweet nor sour; core them by using an applecorer or a steel fork; set them in biscuit tins and fill the cavities with sugar, a little butter, and some ground cinnamon, if you like; set them in the oven and bake until done.
The instructions assume a cook who knows what a baked apple should look like coming out of the oven. The gaps worth filling are the pan, the temperature and the choice of fruit.
- "Biscuit tins"Not cookie tins in the modern sense but the shallow rectangular pans used for baking soda biscuits. Any shallow baking dish with a rim works; the rim matters because the apples give up a good deal of syrupy juice.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Baked apples do best at 350-375F. Higher and the skinless surface dries and browns before the flesh collapses.
- TimingReckon on 30 to 45 minutes for medium apples, depending on variety and size. They are done when a knife slips in with no resistance and the fruit has just begun to slump.
- "Neither sweet nor sour"Most likely a balanced apple that holds its shape rather than a true sour cooker. Among modern varieties, Braeburn, Jonagold, Golden Delicious or Cortland suit; Bramley and other true sour cookers will blow apart into sauce, and a very sweet eating apple turns flat and mealy.
- Pared, not skin-onThe recipe has you peel the apples, which is why they must be watched: without skin there is nothing holding them together. A tablespoon or two of water in the pan, and basting once or twice with the pan syrup, keeps the surfaces from leathering.
- Filling proportionsAbout a tablespoon of sugar, a teaspoon of butter and a pinch of cinnamon per apple. The cavity will not hold much more, and the overflow is what makes the sauce in the pan.
- ServingOne apple per person, warm, with the pan syrup spooned over and cream or a custard sauce alongside. They reheat well, and are also good cold.
The Home Cook Book (1877) was compiled by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold for charity, following the model of the Chicago fundraising cookbooks of the same decade. Baked apples belong to the oldest and plainest end of the English and North American dessert repertoire: fruit, sugar, butter, spice, and an oven that is already hot from the day's baking. In a wood-fired range there was often no reason to give a temperature, since the cook could work with whatever heat remained after the bread came out, and apples were among the few fruits a nineteenth-century household could generally count on having in the cellar from October well into spring.