Take fair early apples, wipe them, lay them in a preserving kettle, and put to half a peck a coffee-cup of brown sugar, and half a pint of water. Cover them and boil them gently, until they are tender and penetrated with the sugar.
They may be done quite as well in a jar in the oven, but care must be taken that they are not cooked too much. Early apples will bake with a very moderate heat.
Common Family Apple-Sauce.
Let your stock of apples be picked over several times in the course of the winter, and all the defective ones taken out. Let the good parts of these be pared, and if not used for pies, be made into apple-sauce. Boil it in a preserving kettle. After it is tender, add a pint bowl of brown sugar, and boil it gently fifteen minutes longer. Towards spring, when apples become tasteless, a teaspoonful of tartaric acid, dissolved in a little water, should be added to a gallon of apple.
Boiled Pears.
These are eaten with roast meat instead of apple or cranberry sauce. Choose fair, smooth ones; put them into cold water and boil them whole, without paring and without sugar. It will take an hour, or an hour and a half, according to the size of the fruit.
[To Stew Dried Apples or Peaches.]
Wash them in two or three waters, and put them to soak in rather more water than will cover them, as they absorb a great deal. After soaking two hours, put them into a preserving kettle in the same water, and with a lemon or orange cut up; boil them till very tender; when they rise up in the kettle press them down with a skimmer or spoon, but do not stir them. When they are tender, add clean brown sugar, and boil fifteen or twenty minutes longer.
Dried apples are rendered tasteless by being strained or stirred so as to break them up; and they are also injured by soaking over night.
If they are to be used for pies, there should be more sugar added than for sauce, and a small piece of butter stirred in while they are hot. Nutmeg and clove are good spices for dried apple-pies.