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Baked Apples
Wipe nicely and core with an apple corer six fine, sound, not too ripe, apples. Lay them on tin with one-half gill hot water. Fill the cavity of each with granulated sugar and baste the top of each with just a little melted butter. Place in a moderate oven to bake for thirty-five minutes, or until rice and soft. Remove from the oven. Dress on a hot dish and serve with a pitcher of cream or milk.
A plain baked apple, dependent almost entirely on the apple you choose and on not letting the pan go dry.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons — a shallow film of water in the pan. Its job is steam, not poaching; top it up if it evaporates before the apples are done.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 350F. At that heat 35 minutes suits medium apples; large ones can take 45 to 55 minutes.
- "Until rice and soft"A typesetter's error for "nice and soft." The test is a skewer sliding into the flesh with no resistance while the apple still holds its shape.
- Choosing the apple"Not too ripe" is the hinge. A firm baking apple — Rome Beauty, Northern Spy, Braeburn, Bramley — holds together; a soft eating apple such as Red Delicious collapses into sauce.
- CoringCore from the stem end but stop short of the base so the sugar and butter do not run out into the pan. Scoring the skin once around the equator keeps it from splitting untidily.
- Sugar and butterReckon on about a tablespoon of sugar per apple and a teaspoon of melted butter over the top. Basting once or twice during baking gives a better glaze than a single application.
- "Tin"Any shallow baking tin or ovenproof dish; earthenware is if anything better, as it holds heat while the apples come to the table.
- YieldSix apples, one per person. Serve hot with cold cream or milk poured at the table, as directed — the contrast is the point of the dish.
Baked apples belong to the oldest layer of English and American home cookery, needing only an oven with residual heat and requiring no pastry, no eggs and very little sugar -- which is why they turn up constantly in nineteenth-century household books as nursery food, invalid food and family dessert alike. The dish also suited the conditions of cellar storage: apples that had begun to shrivel or spot by late winter could still be baked when they were no longer pleasant raw.