Peaches, Plums, Cherries, Berries, and all small fruits may be cooked for sauce by stewing in a small amount of water, adding sugar to sweeten when done.
Baked Apples.—Take any good tart apples; peel, cut in halves, and remove the cores. Scatter a few spoonfuls of sugar in the bottom of a dish, and lay the apples in, flat side down; add a teacupful of cold water, and bake till tender. Let stand in the dish till cold, then take up the pieces in a vegetable dish, and poor over them what juice remains. Sweet apples are good baked in this way without sugar.
Baked Pears.—Peel ripe pears; cut in halves, and pack in layers in a stone ware jar. Strew a little sugar over each layer, and add a small cupful of water, to prevent burning. Cover tightly, and bake three or four hours in a well-heated oven. Let them get very cold, and serve with sweet cream.
Baked Peaches.—Peaches which are ripe but too hard for eating, are nice baked. Pare, remove the stones, and place in loose layers in a shallow, earthen pudding dish with a little water. Sprinkle each layer lightly with sugar, cover and bake.
Cranberries.—Cranberries make an excellent sauce, but the skins are rather hard of digestion, and it is best to exclude them. Stew in the proportion of a quart of berries to a pint of water, simmering gently until the skins have all burst, and the quantity is reduced to a pint. Put through a colander to remove the skins, and when nearly cool, add for the quart of berries two thirds of a cup of sugar.
Cranberries with Raisins.—Cook the cranberries as in the preceding recipe, and when rubbed through the colander, add for every pound of cranberries before cooking, one fourth pound of raisins which have been steeped for half an hour in just sufficient boiling water to cover. A little less sugar will be needed to sweeten than when served without the raisins.
Cranberries and Sweet Apples.—Stew equal parts of cranberries and sweet apples together. Mash, rub through a fine sieve or colander to remove the skins and make the whole homogeneous. This makes a very palatable sauce without the addition of sugar. California prunes and cranberries stewed together in equal proportion, in a small quantity of water, also make a nice sauce without sugar.
Oranges and Apples.—The mild, easy cooking, tart varieties of apples make an excellent sauce stewed with one third sliced oranges from which the seeds have been removed. Pare, core, and slice the apples, and cook gently so as to preserve the form of both fruits until the apples are tender. Add sugar to sweeten, and if desired a very little of the grated yellow of the orange rind.
Stewed Raisins.—Soak a pint of good raisins, cleaned and freed from stems, in cold water for several hours. When ready to cook, put them, with the water in which they were soaked, in a fruit kettle and simmer until the skins are tender. Three or four good-sized figs, chopped quite fine, cooked with the raisins, gives an additional richness and thickness of juice. No sugar will be needed.
Dried Apples.—Good apples properly dried make a very palatable sauce; but unfortunately the fruit generally selected for drying is of so inferior a quality that if cooked in its fresh state it would not be good. The dried fruit in most of our markets needs to be looked over carefully, and thoroughly washed before using. Put into a granite-ware kettle, cover with boiling water, and cook gently until tender. Fresh steam-dried or evaporated apples will cook in from one half to three fourths of an hour; if older, they may require from one to two more hours. Add boiling water, as needed, during the cooking. If when tender they are lacking in juice, add a little boiling water long enough before lifting from the fire to allow it to boil up once. If the fruit is very poor, a few very thin slices of the yellow portion of lemon or orange rind added a half hour before it is done, will sometimes be an improvement.