Apple Sauce
Get fine juicy apples—bellflowers are the best for cooking. Sweet apples cook very badly—becoming tough, dry and tasteless. Green apples, if full grown, cook well, and have a pleasant acid.
For sauce, pare, core, and quarter or slice the apples. Wash the pieces in a cullender, and put them to stew, with only water enough to wet them a little. Apple stews that are thin and watery are disgraceful to the cook, or to the cook’s mistress. Let them stew till you can mash them easily all through. Then take them off the fire, and sweeten them, adding the seasoning while the apples are warm. Season with rose-water, lemon juice, nutmeg; or with all these if for company. If you can get fresh lemon-peel, cut it into very thin slips, and put it in to stew with the apples at first. It is still better, and little more trouble, to grate the lemon-peel.
Fruit for pies should be stewed in the same manner as for sauce, and not sweetened till taken from the fire. Let the paste be baked empty in large deep plates, and when cool, filled to the brim with stewed fruit. A pie, (as we have seen them,) only half or one third full, looks very meanly—and tastes so.
All these fruit-sauces are good receipts for stewing fruit for pies or any other purpose.
We advise all families to have, among their kitchen utensils, bain maries, or double-kettles, putting the article to be stewed in the inner kettle, and the boiling water in the outside one. They are to be had of all sizes at the furnishing stores. They are also excellent for custards and boiled puddings.