Home › The World's Kitchen › Apples with Butter-Vanille
Apples with Butter-Vanille
Peel three large, sound, green apples; cut in halve, cut out the cores, then cut each half in four slices. Place in an earthen baking dish, arranged in the form of a crown, one overlapping another; sprinkle with two tablespoons fine sugar, drop two teaspoons vanilla essence evenly over them. Divide a half ounce good butter in small bits, and place the apples; cover with a lightly buttered piece of white paper. Place in a hot oven to bake for fifteen minutes or till soft;' remove,, dress six saucers with four slices of apple, pour the liquor over, evenly divided, and serve.
A plain baked apple dish that depends almost entirely on how the fruit is cut and how briefly it cooks. The whole thing takes under half an hour.
- Oven temperature"A hot oven" in this period is usually taken to mean somewhere in the 400-450F range. At the upper end fifteen minutes is plausible for slices this size; check at ten and pull them as soon as a knife goes through without resistance.
- Butter and sugar quantitiesHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon, dotted over the whole dish. Two tablespoons of "fine sugar" means caster or superfine; ordinary granulated works, though it dissolves more slowly on the surface.
- Green applesThis means firm tart cooking apples, not Granny Smith specifically. Any apple that holds its shape will do; Braeburn, Golden Delicious or Gala all keep their slices intact, while McIntosh collapses.
- Vanilla essenceTwo teaspoons is generous by modern standards and is the whole point of the dish, so do not cut it. Use real extract rather than imitation, and scatter it over the sugar so it does not pool in one slice.
- The buttered paperThis acts as a cartouche: it holds in steam so the apples soften without browning or drying. A round of parchment, buttered on the underside and laid directly on the fruit, does the same job.
- The crown arrangementOverlapping the slices in a ring is probably not decoration alone; the pieces support one another as they soften, and the juices gather in the dish.
- The "liquor"There is very little of it, perhaps a few spoonfuls of buttery syrup. Tilt the baking dish and spoon it over the plated slices at once; if the fruit stands, the syrup sets on the dish rather than the apples.
- YieldThree apples give twenty-four slices, four to each of six small saucers. As written this is a light dessert course rather than a substantial pudding; served in two larger bowls it makes a modest dessert for two.
The dish belongs to the same family as the many baked and stewed apple preparations that fill the sweet chapters of Central European cookery, and the "Vanille" of the title points that way. Vanilla with apple is often associated with the Viennese pastry tradition, where vanilla sugar was a common sweet flavoring before extract was sold in bottles. The buttered paper is used here in place of a lid.