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2003-12-03
My grandmother Ella had the right idea when it came to baked apples. She made them on Friday afternoons before the Jewish Sabbath, filling the centers with red jam and roasting them along with the chicken or brisket. Come dessert, she arranged the apples on a platter, pouring on top the sugary sauce studded with raisins and nuts from the pan. Then she set the platter on her white lace tablecloth next to the strudel or rugelach or chocolate cake and watched as we devoured the pastries and left the fruit.
That was precisely the point. Grandma, a rotund lady whose sideboard was filled with sugar buttons, jelly rings and kosher chocolate covered cherries, understood the meaning of dessert. And apples, even filled with jam, did not fit that definition.
Instead, the apples were served the next day in what she and I considered their proper incarnation—breakfast, cold from the fridge, and bathed in cream. Sometimes they appeared at dinner on Saturday as an appetizer. And in the waning era of fruit-filled gelatin molds, baked apples made a salad, too.
My family was not the only one with this apple attitude. Jeffrey Bank, an owner of Artie’s Delicatessen on the Upper West Side, remembers his Grandma Bea serving baked apples cooked without any sugar.
“They weren’t really dessert,” he said, “they were a diet dessert. You used to see them on the menu of Jewish delis all the time, the diet baked apple. We make ours with a little sweet-n-low. That’s what your classic New York deli customer wants, they order their diet baked apple and their Cel-Ray soda after their pastrami.”
In the long history of baked apples (which, one would assume, dates back as far as fire and apples), plain cooked fruit without any kind of sweetener was not always considered the food of abstinence. Stuffed with sausage or mincemeat, as was popular in the 18th century, they could be decadently savory.
If you start with an intense, spicy apple, baking concentrates the flavor and adds a caramel nuance to the juice. In the 19th century, Fannie Farmer in the Original Boston Cooking School Cookbook (1896 edition) directs her readers to bake naked apples in autumn, when the fruit is at its best. In late winter, after the apples have been stored for several months, she advised a thick dusting of powdered ginger, mace and sugar along with some rose water.
Dorothy Hartley gives this advice for roast apples, prepared without sugar, in her seminal “Food in England” (1954, Macdonald) give this: “When the cores are left in, the pips give a pleasant aroma to the fruit, so well-flavored apples should be roasted whole. Later in the year the core may be withdrawn with a scoop.”
Should you not be in possession of one, an apple scoop, she wrote, is the shank bone of a sheep, cut at a slant and filed smooth.
These plain roasted apples were meant to be served as an accompaniment to roasted meat or fowl, not as a confection. For dessert, I have seen baked apples embellished with everything from jam, dried fruit, nuts, mashed bananas, vanilla beans, spices, molasses and maple syrup to pineapple juice, apple cider, meringue, marshmallows and coca-cola. This last ingredient was the secret of the Grand Street Dairy restaurant in Manhattan. The cola reduced in the oven, melding with the apple juice to become a rich syrup. Regulars ate the apple with a dollop of sour cream for, not after, lunch.
I would have given up on the baked apple-as-dessert idea if I had not, in a fit of nostalgia, decided to try out a few recipes and see if maybe I could find one that was truly satisfying to the sweet-toothed. All the recipes I tried were good enough for breakfast. But even when the juice that surrounded the apples was compellingly thick and condensed, the apple flesh itself tended to be watery, granular and lean and nowhere as good as apple pie.
It wasn’t until I realized that tarte Tatin is, in fact, baked apples on a pastry crust that I began to recognize the baked apple’s candied, caramelized potential. So why couldn’t regular baked apples achieve this glorious, glazed state of being? Surely it doesn’t depend on the crust.
In fact, the problem is the way the apples are prepared before baking. In a tarte Tatin, the apples are always peeled, and then either sliced or at least halved, traditional baked apples are left whole and only partially peeled, which keeps them from melting into a formless mush. But the skin also prevents them for absorbing enough of the syrup. The solution? Piercing the unpeeled apple flesh with a knife, which lets in more syrup, and basting often with the pan juices.
Now, I like to bake my apples in a combination of maple syrup, wine and brown sugar, flavored with fresh ginger and whole spices. It produces apples that are tender, suffused with syrup and highly aromatic. Served with a brandied custard sauce, it is a recipe indulgent enough to call dessert. I am sure even my grandmother would agree.
Spiced Baked Apples with Maple Caramel Sauce
Time: 1 hours 10 minutes
4 teaspoons unsalted butter, plus additional for the pan
4 tart baking apples, such as Winesap or Empire
1/3 cup plus 4 teaspoons maple syrup
4 teaspoons brown sugar, optional
4 teaspoons chopped pecans, optional
4 teaspoons chopped golden raisins, optional
1/4 cup dry white wine or water
3 cardamom pods
2 whole cloves
1/4-inch thick slice fresh gingerroot
2-inch piece cinnamon stick
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Butter a small cake or baking pan. Use a vegetable peeler to peel a strip of skin from around the stem of each apple. Use a melon baler or grapefruit spoon to scoop out the core of each apple, leaving at least 1/4-inch at the base. Stand the apples in the pan and use a paring knife to make 6 vertical cuts around the cavity, being sure not to pierce through the bottom of the apple.
2. Place 1 teaspoon of butter and 1 teaspoon of maple syrup into the cavity of each apple. If using the filling, mix together the brown sugar, pecans and raisins, and stuff 1/4 of this mixture into each apple cavity. Pour the remaining 1/3 cup maple syrup and the wine into the bottom of the pan, and add the cardamom, cloves, ginger and cinnamon stick.
3. Bake the apples, basting with the liquid in the pan every 5 to 7 minutes, until tender yet not collapsed, 45 minutes to an hour. Serve warm or at room temperature, with custard if desired.
Yield: 4 servings
Note: Apples can be made without the filling of brown sugar, pecans and raisins.
Brandied Custard
Time: 15 minutes
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup milk
3 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, pulp scraped
3 large egg yolks
1 tablespoon brandy
Freshly grated nutmeg, for garnish
1. In a saucepan over medium heat, whisk together the cream and milk with 2 tablespoons of the sugar and the vanilla bean pod and pulp.
2. In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the remaining 1 1/2 tablespoons of sugar. When the cream heats to just below a simmer, drizzle half of it into the egg yolk mixture, whisking constantly. Add the yolk mixture back into the saucepan, whisking constantly.
3. Cook the sauce over low heat, stirring with a wooden spoon, until it is thick enough to coat the back of the spoon, about 5 minutes. Strain the mixture into a bowl and stir in the brandy. Serve warm or cold, garnished with the nutmeg.
Yield: 1 1/4 cups