Straight To Applesauce Recipe

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For as long as I can remember, applesauce has been a staple on our dinner table. As a side dish, we eat it warm or cold. Often it takes the place of a salad. As a child, I liked to top freshly cooked green beans with it. My brother preferred a dollop of it on chocolate cake.

My parents’ small orchard provided an ample supply of a variety of apples, but Mother’s favorites for sauce were the tart Yellow Transparent or Early Harvest apples. When they ripened early in July, we spent many hours washing, quartering, coring and cooking them. Then we pressed them with a wooden pestle through a colander to remove the peels. Finally we filled and sealed glass jars and boiled them in a covered canner to keep the sauce from spoiling during the winter.

When I married, I was delighted to find that my husband’s parents also had a Yellow Transparent apple tree. History records that these cold-resistant trees were imported from Russia sometime in the nineteenth century. My parents-in-law, like the trees, had also emigrated from Russia, although a century later.

As the 1940s gave way to the ‘50s, home freezers became available. So, instead of canning the sauce, my mother-in-law froze it for future use. My children, now adults, remember that Grandma invariably didn’t get the sauce from the freezer in time for it to thaw completely by meal time. They loved the frozen part in the middle of the bowl and almost fought to see who would get it.

It was the custom at my childhood home to garnish the applesauce with a sprinkling of cinnamon to enhance the flavor. I learned early in my married life, however, to leave out the cinnamon. “Why spoil it?” asks my husband. But the spice container finds a spot at the table for anyone who wants it. My children and grandchildren now enjoy my thick, homemade applesauce and declare that it tastes much better than the store kind.

After moving 140 miles away from our parents, my husband and I had found that Yellow Transparent apples are available at orchards for only a short season. They are fragile, thin-skinned, easily bruised, and expensive. We then planted a tree of our own and enjoyed its fruit for twenty-five years before it succumbed to disease.

In the meantime, I learned that the sturdier, less costly autumn apples also make delicious sauce. For firm apples, like Cortland, Macintosh, Ida Red, Jonathan, and Empire, I’ve found that a mechanical apple peeler is a great time-saver. I simply push the apple onto the peeler and turn the handle. In seconds, the gadget removes the core, peels and slices the apple.

Perhaps the biggest time-saver is the microwave oven. In the time it takes to cook one batch of sauce, I can prepare the next batch of apples. Another perk of speedy cooking is the light-yellow color, a quality judged desirable in friendly competition among the family’s cooks. If you should decide to make more sauce than you can consume in a few days, freezing it is still a smart choice. The microwave helps with thawing, too, but you might miss the special treat of the frozen part in the middle.

Here’s my modernized, energy- and time-saving adaptation of the family applesauce recipe, which, by the way, has a healthy dose of fiber and no fat. Use your favorite cooking apples and adjust the amount of sugar to your taste. I use about 3/8 cup for Granny Smith apples, 1/4 cup or less for Jonathan and Rome. If you wish, use a sugar substitute. A friend says that Golden Delicious apples require no sugar.

Applesauce Recipe:

7 Cups tart cooking apples, peeled, cored, and sliced

¼ Cup water

½ Cup (or less) sugar