Applesauce Meringue: Low effort, and not that bad

Ever want to make dessert without putting in the effort?

Applesauce Meringue 2 eggs, separated 2 cups applesauce Sugar to taste 3 tbsp powdered sugar (for meringue) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a small baking dish. (Like, a really small one. I used a round pan about 5 inches across.) Beat the egg yolks in a medium or large mixing bowl. Mix in the applesauce, and add sugar to taste. Pour into the baking dish and bake 15 minutes. When the baking time is almost over, beat the egg whites until frothy. Gradually add the powdered sugar, beating all the time. Then continue beating until the mixture forms stiff peaks. After the applesauce has baked 15 minutes, remove it from the oven and carefully spread the meringue on top. Bake for another 15 minutes, then allow to cool completely. Undated newspaper clipping, Chicago area (probably 1930s or 1940s)

Today we are revisiting my great-grandmother's cooking notebook. I get the impression that this recipe was made for those days when you feel fundamentally done with cooking but still want dessert. It also looks perfect for those who are short on both money and time (and keep in mind this was probably printed in the 1930s). 

 

That's barely legible, isn't it? It was a little better in person, if not by very much. But if we really mess with color filters, we can make it almost easy to read.

And so, we begin by putting egg yolks into applesauce. Of course, egg yolks are a pretty standard way to thicken custards. But I almost got the impression that we're only adding them here because we already cracked the egg whites for the meringue. After all, it's hard to justify throwing out eggs in any era.

The recipe says to add two cups of "sweetened applesauce." I don't know if they meant to purchase sweetened applesauce, or if they were implying to add your own sugar without wasting any column-inches on extra words. Our applesauce was factory-sweetened but a bit bland, so I stirred in about two tablespoons of sugar to help it along.

If this recipe didn't involve making a meringue, I would have called this a Hump-Day Quickie. We had it in a baking dish only three minutes after our egg yolks landed in the mixing bowl. 

After the prescribed fifteen minutes, our apple custard hadn't set. I would have baked it longer, but I don't know if two egg yolks were up to the task of setting an entire pint of applesauce. They might only serve to make the dessert "richer" in some undefined way. So I got the meringue on top of it as best I could without mixing the two together. I didn't have an aesthetic triumph, but it's kind of silly to get hung up on presentation when the recipe was supposed to be simple.

Really, the meringue is the only part of this recipe that takes more than a minute. But hand-cranked eggbeaters had already gotten cheap by the time this recipe was printed. So even if you couldn't afford the monthly payment on an electric mixer (or if the electricity in your city was either unreliable or absent), this wasn't an hourlong ordeal with a whisk. And I can't imagine the newspaper's recipe writers having someone hand-whisk a meringue only to spread it on applesauce.

Of course, I didn't turn on the oven just for this little bowl. But that's another advantage of the recipe: if you're baking your dinner, you can easily find room on the rack for dessert. Of course, as often happens when I economize on oven heat, the tiny pan took longer to bake than everything else. I tried and halfway succeeded to convince myself that it's not too horrible a waste of heat if I simply leave the oven on for a few minutes after dinner is ready.

The meringue puffed up beautifully in the oven. At first I was absolutely delighted, then I realized that every time they rise like that, they always fall back down. But for a short half-minute, our dessert had a golden, airy dome on top.

Sure enough, the meringue deflated only a few minutes after it left the oven. Even though I made sure it made contact with the pan all the way around the side, it ripped off and shrank away. I could have gotten dismayed about this, but instead I told myself that 1: this is supposed to be "a simple dessert" (their words) and 2: there is no point in fretting over barely-modified applesauce.

After our simple dessert had cooled off, I put it in the refrigerator. I can't imagine anyone liking warm applesauce for dessert.

I almost want to say this is bad, but it's more like... exactly what you think it is. I was going to throw it out, but then I was like "Hmm... I actually kinda like it." And even though applesauce never excites me, this was really nice with lunch on a hot day. I wouldn't go out of my way to make it again, but I wouldn't mind sliding it into the oven if I was already baking something.