Pink of Perfection

“Quick—there’s a car coming!” calls my mom, sounding excessively guilty for so minor a crime: we’ve brought a shopping bag to fill with just some of the hundreds of grounded apples in the preserved lot next to my grandmother’s farm. My mom senses a breach in rural etiquette—like shooting one of the king’s deer, she says—but I am blinded by greed whenever faced with free produce or free beauty products. Once you’ve survived the scrum of 8 editors—with 12 others trying to squeeze in—combing through a single plastic bin full of makeup and managed to emerge with all of the coveted French brands, you tend not to be fazed by things like whether the people in the passing pickup approve of your shameless apple nab. In fact, I was thinking we should go back for more bags.

My mom wins, of course, but when we get home with our half-bag, my grandmother has a surprise. “Go downstairs to the dining room and look for the applesauce maker hidden under a chair.” My nanny has this wonderful way of dating objects around the house: “Everything in that cabinet was here when I got here, and I moved here in 1947.” This is what happens when so many generations of the same family inhabit the same space: brides arrive, babies are born, the older generations pass on, but no one ever moves out, per se. Which is how you end up with a horsehair sofa in the attic and an applesauce maker under a chair. My grandmother saved her money for white cotton curtains trimmed with pom poms, which she bought one pair at a time, until they hung in every window. She didn’t spring for kitchen gadgets, and I’m much the same way.

But boy, do I love this applesauce maker, which my mom tells me is also known as a chinois, because it saves you all kinds of time. You don’t peel, core, or quarter the apples. You just pitch them whole in a pot with a little water and some cinnamon sticks until they break down. Then you run the mush through the perforated sieve, above a bowl to catch the puree, and think of things to pair it with, like sausages or French toast (I made mine with my aunt Madelyn’s whole wheat bread). A sneaky spoon full of red jelly gives the applesauce a nice pink color, says my grandmother, in keeping with today’s shameless theme.

Katy McColl Lukens writes for a bunch of big magazines, but since she’s my sister, she does me the favor of dropping in to blog here, too.

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