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Baked Apples
Select 6 smooth, uniform sized apples. Wash and core. Fill the centers with one tablespoon light brown sugar. Place in shallow pan, pour two-thirds cup boiling water about them, bake till tender, twenty to forty minutes according to size and variety of apples. Baste while baking. A little lemon juice or cinnamon may be added for flavor. Chopped nuts or raisins may be mixed with sugar for filling apples.
A plain baked apple with almost nothing added. The recipe assumes a hot oven and a cook standing nearby with a spoon, and it omits the one number a modern reader wants.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given at all; the recipe only says to bake till tender. A moderate oven, around 375F, suits the twenty-to-forty minute range quoted.
- Choose the variety carefullyThis is the hinge. An apple that collapses gives you sauce in a skin. Use a firm baking apple — Braeburn, Northern Spy, Rome Beauty, Golden Delicious — rather than Red Delicious or McIntosh.
- CoringCore from the stem end without going all the way through, so the sugar and juice stay inside. A melon baller or apple corer works better than a knife.
- The bastingBasting is not optional here — the sugar-and-water syrup in the pan is what glazes the skin. Spoon it over two or three times during baking, and score or peel a ring around the top of each apple to keep the skins from splitting.
- Water quantityTwo-thirds cup is enough for a snug pan; in a wide roasting tin it will evaporate before the apples are done. Use a dish that just holds the six apples and add a splash more water if the bottom goes dry.
- FillingOne tablespoon of brown sugar per apple is modest by current tastes. Nuts, raisins and a lump of butter in each cavity all work, and cinnamon or lemon juice is worth adding rather than treating as optional.
- Yield and servingSix apples, one per person. Serve warm with the pan syrup poured over, and cream or plain yogurt if you want it.
Baked apples belong to the oldest and cheapest end of the dessert repertoire — fruit, sugar, water and the residual heat of an oven that was already lit for something else. Recipes of this kind run almost unchanged through nineteenth- and twentieth-century American household books, and their appearance in a utility cookbook like this one reflects the period's interest in inexpensive, digestible desserts. Apples were the default household fruit: stored in barrels or cellars through the winter, they were still usable for baking long after they had gone soft for eating out of hand, which is one reason so many old recipes bake them rather than serve them raw.