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Apples Au Madere
Core and neatly wipe six good-sized, sound apples. Place them on a round baking dish just large enough to hold the apples.
Knead on a plate one ounce fresh butter, three ounces sugar and half teaspoon vanilla essence, and with it fill up the cavities of the apples. Pour over a gill of Madeira wine (sherry). Set in oven for forty-five minutes, basting, them quite frequently meanwhile. Remove, place the dish in another dish and serve, either hot or cold.
A straightforward baked apple, distinguished only by the wine in the dish and the frequency of basting. Both matter more than they look.
- A gill of MadeiraA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. That is enough to sit shallowly under six apples and reduce to a syrup, not enough to poach them; do not increase it or the tops will stay pale while the bottoms stew.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Forty-five minutes for whole, unpeeled apples points to a moderate oven, 350F. Firm baking apples may want an extra ten minutes; test with a skewer at the shoulder rather than the core.
- Basting is the hinge"quite frequently" is not defined; in practice every ten minutes or so answers it. The wine and the butter-sugar filling that leaks out combine into the glaze, and apples left unbasted tend to come out dull with the syrup catching underneath.
- Cored, not peeled"Core and neatly wipe" is deliberate: the skin holds the fruit together through three-quarters of an hour. Core from the stem end and stop short of the base so the filling and wine do not run straight out.
- The fillingOne ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; three ounces sugar is a scant half cup. Kneading them to a paste on a plate, as directed, keeps the mixture in the cavity instead of melting away in the first five minutes.
- Vanilla essenceRead as half a teaspoon of modern vanilla extract. The strength of nineteenth-century essences varied and some were already synthetic, so there is no need to increase the quantity.
- Choosing applesSix good-sized apples means something that holds shape: Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Bramley if you want it collapsing into sauce. Red Delicious and most soft eating apples will split and slump.
- The dish within a dishThe recipe simply says to set the baking dish inside another for serving, presumably as a matter of table presentation. A shallow gratin dish just large enough to crowd the apples still does the real work: it keeps the small amount of wine deep enough to baste from.
- YieldSix apples, six servings, with a spoonful of syrup each. The recipe allows it either hot or cold; cold, the syrup thickens as it cools.
Madeira and sherry were the standard cooking wines of the Anglo-American kitchen well into the twentieth century, valued because they are fortified and so kept for months after opening in a house without refrigeration; the recipe glosses Madeira with "(sherry)" as a matter of course, treating the two as interchangeable for the purpose. Baked apples were thoroughly familiar to American readers. Filippini, who cooked at Delmonico's in New York, wrote for households aspiring to restaurant manners, which explains the instruction to present the baking dish inside a second dish rather than turning the apples out.