Eat 'Em, Cook 'Em, Bake 'Em - Now's The Time

Eat ’Em, Cook ’Em, Bake ’Em---Now’s The Time

By Jan Walker

Pick your favorite—the Farmers’ Market on Detroit St. has ’em all. For eating, choose Red Delicious, Macintosh, Snows, Jonathans or Winesaps. Try Rhode Island Greens, Northern Spys, Wagners, Baldwins and Wolfe Rivers for baking and cooking. Steel Reds are a good winter apple. Staying crisp seemingly forever, they are eatable and cookable.

A colorful array of fruits and vegetables of every description, chickens, eggs and baked goods may all be seen on the Farmers’ Market at this time of year. Decorative items—flowers, gourds, Indian corn and bittersweet—add their share to the flavor of the scene. But it's the apple that catches and holds the eye longest.

THE apples? The thousands of apples. Their colors range from pale yellow to deep, deep red. Their uses from eating,to baking to cooking. Their consistency from mealy to crisp, crackling fresh. Their taste from swe-e-e-t to o-o-oh sour.

And just what do you do with all these apples? Well, there’s apple pie. "But my family gets tired of it eventually,’’ you say. Make it the Italian way, then, young lady.

Your family will like them baked, too—in dumplings, fritters,-turnovers. They’ll like applesauce— applesauce cake and cupcakes— apple rollettes and apple crisp.

ITALIAN APPLE PIE

To a pastry recipe, your family’s favorite, add 1/2 cup of sugar and1/4 teaspoon of ginger or allspice. Cut the salt in the pastry to 1/4 teaspoon. Then add the apples and continue in your usual way.

APPLE ROLLETTES

Roll out a recipe of biscuit dough. (This time make your own, the mix spoils it.) Sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on the biscuit rectangle. Spread three or four sliced apples over it. Roll up as you would for jelly roll and cut round slices. Bake in a medium oven (about 350 degrees) until done. Remove and serve with cream.

BAKED APPLES

Core as many Wolfe River apples as you wish to bake. Cut a slice of the skin from the top and bottom. To be extra fancy, pare a half-inch slice around the middle. Stuff the hollow centers with brown sugar and butter or white sugar and cinnamon candies. Keep a careful eye on them so that they don’t lose their shape. When they are done, you may have a syrup in the bottom of the baking dish. Remove the apples and let the syrup cook down over a burner. Spoon it over the baked apples and top them with whipped cream.

APPLE FRITTERS

Pare, core and slice, tart apples (Rhode Island Greens or Northern Spys are probably best). Make a batter of 1 1/3
cups of flour, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 1 egg and 2/3 cup of milk by sifting the dry ingredients together and adding well-beaten egg and milk. Dip each slice of apple into batter and fry in deep fat two or three minutes. Serve with confectioners sugar.

APPLE CRISP Place 4 cups of sliced apples in a buttered baking dish. Sprinkle with 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1/4 cup of water. Rub together 3/4 cup of sifted flour, 1 cup of sugar and 1/3 cup of butter. Drop mixture over the apples. Bake in moderate oven about 40 minutes. Serve with cream.

And, young lady, a note of warning. Don’t get so busy thinking of ways to cook apples that you forget to buy some for snacking. Apples, polished within an inch of their lives, have a place on your coffee table. Serve the gang hot, buttered popcorn and pass the apples. The best eating apples are Red Delicious, Macintosh, Snows, Jonathans and Winesaps.