Baked Apple Sauce
Core very nicely as many fine juicy apples as will fill a large baking-pan. All coring of apples should be done with a tin cover. This you can buy at a tinman’s for a quarter dollar, and it is invaluable for the purpose. After coring the apples, pare them smooth and evenly. Put a large table-spoonful of cold water in the bottom of the baking-pan, and then put in the apples first, filling, with fine brown sugar, the hole from whence the core was taken out. To have them very nice, add some grated lemon-peel, or some rose-water. Set the pan into an oven, (not too hot,) close the oven, and bake till the apples are all broken and can be easily mashed. This way of making apple sauce, by baking in a close oven, will be found far superior to boiling or stewing them. They require no more water than is barely sufficient to give them a start at the bottom.
The flavoring (sugar, lemon, or rose,) may be deferred till the apples are baked, taken out of the oven and mashed. Then mix it in while hot.
Boiled apple sauce is usually spoiled with too much water, rendering it the consistence of thin pap, weak, washy, and mean.