Apple Sauce

Get fine juicy apples - bell-flowers 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 thstes 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.

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 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.

Gooseberry Sauce

Get fine full-grown green gooseberries. Pick them over, and top and tail them. Wash them in a cullender or sieve through two waters. Put them into an enameled stew-pan, with only the water remaining on them after washing, and no sugar till after they are stewed to a mash, and taken from the fire. Then while hot, stir in brown sugar enough to make them very sweet. Serve them up cold. For company, before they are sweetened, press them through a sieve, using only the pulp. Then add the sugar; and mould the whole in a form.