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Coddled Apples
8 medium sized red apples 1¾ cups boiling water 3/4 cup Karo 3 cloves Small piece stick cinnamon Wash the apples, place in a rather flat saucepan with the water, Karo and spices. Cover and simmer gently on top of the stove or in the oven for about two hours, turning the apples occasionally so they will not burst. When done they will be almost translucent. Remove from the pan and pour the syrup When chilled, it will be thick enough to "jell." over.
A gentle, long-simmered whole apple in corn syrup. Two details carry the dish: the apples stay unpeeled and whole, and the liquid must never reach a real boil.
- KaroKaro is corn syrup, still sold under that name. Light (clear) Karo is what is meant here; dark Karo would work but muddies the colour that the recipe is aiming for.
- Why the skins stay onThe peel holds each apple together through two hours of cooking and contributes pectin, which helps the syrup set. Red apples are specified, presumably for colour, some of which bleeds from the skin into the syrup.
- Choose a firm varietyModern supermarket apples vary enormously. A Rome Beauty, Braeburn or Northern Spy will hold its shape for two hours; a McIntosh will break down well before that, and a Red Delicious tends to go mealy.
- "A rather flat saucepan"A wide, shallow pan so the eight apples sit in one layer and the roughly 2 1/2 cups of liquid comes partway up them. A 12-inch sauté pan or a shallow braiser with a lid is the modern equivalent.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none because it assumes you will match a stovetop simmer. Set the oven to 300F, covered, and check that the liquid is barely trembling rather than bubbling.
- BurstingApples split when the interior steams faster than the skin can stretch, which is what a hard simmer causes. Turning them every 20 to 30 minutes and keeping the heat low is the whole technique.
- TimingTwo hours suits a dense, late-season apple. Start testing at 45 minutes with a skewer; the apples are done when they look translucent and offer no resistance, and further time past that point only risks collapse.
- The garbled last linesThe final sentence has been transposed in the original setting. It should read: remove the apples from the pan and pour the syrup over; when chilled, it will be thick enough to jell.
- YieldEight apples, one per person, served cold or barely warm with the jellied syrup spooned over.
To coddle is to cook just below the boil, an English kitchen verb of long standing that survives today mainly in coddled eggs; applied to fruit it meant the same slow, sub-simmering treatment that keeps a whole apple intact. Whole apples cooked in syrup and eaten cold are often said to have been common American breakfast fare well into the twentieth century, sitting alongside stewed prunes and baked apples as the fruit course before the eggs. The use of Karo rather than sugar dates the recipe firmly: Karo light corn syrup is generally credited to the Corn Products Refining Company in the early 1900s, and it was reportedly promoted in exactly this sort of household cookery collection, partly on the argument that corn syrup resists crystallising and yields a clearer, glossier preserve than a sugar syrup. That the syrup sets on chilling is probably owed less to the corn syrup than to the apples — pectin drawn out of the skins during the long cooking, the same principle behind making jelly from apple peelings and cores — though a chilled, reduced corn-syrup liquid will thicken somewhat on its own as well.