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December 26
Menu: Stuffed Veal Heart, Tomato Sauce; Baked Sweet Potatoes; Mashed Turnips; Lettuce, Apple and Date Salad; Cream Cheese on Toasted Crackers; Baked Apples with Custard; Coffee Baked Apples-Core and peel 8 apples; fill centers with 1/4 cup Crisco creamed with 1/2 cup brown sugar, add 4 tablespoons chopped citron peel, and 1 tablespoon lemon juice mixed together. Mix 2 tablespoons sugar with 1/2 cup water and brush over apples; sprinkle with crumbs browned in hot Crisco; bake for 20 minutes in moderate oven. Serve cold with custard.
A straightforward baked apple, distinctive mainly for being peeled as well as cored and for the sweetened crumb coating. A few of the instructions assume a 1913 kitchen.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F. The original expects a coal or early gas range where the cook judged heat by hand and by how quickly flour browned.
- Twenty minutes is optimisticPeeled, cored apples cook faster than whole ones, but 20 minutes will only soften a small, thin-skinned variety. Test with a skewer and expect 30 to 45 minutes for larger fruit; the apples should yield without collapsing.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, and here it is doing the work of butter in both the filling and the crumbs. Butter can stand in measure for measure, though it carries water as well as fat, so the filling will be slightly softer; many will prefer its flavour in a dessert like this.
- Citron peelCandied citron, the thick-rinded citrus sold in blocks or diced tubs at holiday time. Candied mixed peel or candied orange peel is a fair swap; four tablespoons is a lot of it, so reduce if you dislike the flavor.
- Crumbs browned in hot fatDry breadcrumbs, not fresh, toasted in fat until golden before they go on the apples. Fresh crumbs will steam and slump. Brush the sugar-water on first so they adhere.
- Choice of appleYou need a variety that holds its shape once peeled: Golden Delicious, Braeburn or Northern Spy. A soft cooking apple such as McIntosh will slump into sauce without its skin.
- Yield and servingEight apples, so eight servings. The custard intended is a pouring custard, boiled or stirred custard in period language, essentially crème anglaise, served cold alongside.
This comes from the "Calendar of Dinners" that fills the back of The Story of Crisco, a 1913 promotional cookbook written for Procter & Gamble by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. Crisco, launched in 1911, was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and the book's task was to persuade cooks that a manufactured white shortening could replace butter and lard in everything from pastry to fried fish, which is why the fat appears twice in a dish as simple as a baked apple. The calendar gave a suggested menu for every day of the year, and this one sits at December 27, in the stretch of holiday cooking where candied citron would already be open on the shelf from the Christmas baking. Peeling a baked apple, which turns up in other genteel cookery of the period, made it a knife-and-fork dessert fit for the dinner table rather than a nursery dish.