My Mom's 'Bon Appetit' Baked Apples

It wasn’t enough that my poor mother was the only woman in a house of three men; she also bore witness to my family’s continuing competition to see who could be the sharpest to each other, verbally. Because she was such an easy target (since seeing success as a sign of growth gave her a sense of having done a good job as a parent) she wound up being on the receiving end of more of the barbs than was fair or even decent. And those were just the regular dinners. Holidays were an endeavor of a whole other order.

My mom was too well-schooled in the responsibilities of properly entertaining by her own mother (a Jew from Boston’s North Shore — a tribe which, ironically, makes for the world’s most severe Episcopalians, holiday-wise) to rise above the drudgery that Thanksgiving provides for the unlucky homemaker, even one with a full-time career. My brother and I — who grew successively less charming commensurate to the amount of alcohol we were allowed to consume — would consider our holiday tasks completed once we had added the extra leaf to the table, while my father’s duties mostly consisted of mixing the drinks and picking out the wine, a job which seemed extremely complicated until I was old enough to understand that he was mainly hiding out, lest he be drafted to do something in the kitchen.

So, my poor mother. Apart from planning and cooking the meal, ensuring that the table was set just right (according to some kind of bizarre algorithm which will expire along with her), and arranging the consistent flow of appetizers and entrees and desserts, she also had to charm a motley assortment of guests, which generally included: a pair of visiting relatives from her side of the family — if not her actual mother, which was the worst case scenario — who were trained in the same kind of Jewy New England Thanksgiving entertaining procedures and could thus judge the most harshly; a random friend of my father’s who had suddenly found himself, either through widowerhood or abandonment, between families and befuddled by the turn of events; and whatever old and surly member of the Balk tribe was there to share a life’s worth of wisdom in the form of incessant griping (the curse of the Balk man is that he lives forever; well into the 1990’s our Thanksgivings were regaled by some elderly version of me ranting about something that sonofabitch Senator Taft said about Roosevelt more than half a century earlier). Then there were my brother and me, who, no matter how many years had passed, reverted immediately back to our teenage selves, fighting over issues that had long ago been resolved and never really made a difference in the first place.

Through it all, she shone. She continues to shine. Thanksgiving is her time. Having her family together, feeding her friends, overseeing an evening’s worth of entertainment that makes everyone feel contented and cared for — this is one of the things she waits the whole year for. And no matter how mouthy or drunk or irritated we get, we all know at the end of the night that it doesn’t get any more meaningful than what we’ve been through, and that even if we’d rather be anywhere else, there nowhere else where we’d be as loved and appreciated. That’s the kind of Thanksgiving my mom puts together.

For as long as I can remember, she has made this recipe for dessert: “Baked Wine-glazed Apples Stuffed with Marzipan, Cranberries and Raisins.” She pulled it out of Bon Appetit when they first ran it, and it has been a Balk Thanksgiving staple ever since. “I use small apples instead of the large ones,” she told me when I asked her how she makes it. “They get softer and bake better and I have found that people can only eat one small one as they are very rich.” You should take her word for it. I’ve never tried them myself — marzipan squicks me out and I can be a really obstreperous dick, even to my own mom — but every year they’re the first dessert go, and every year even the surliest of the old men leaves the house raving about them. Now maybe it’s the wine, but I like to think it’s the love. It’s certainly not the marzipan; that stuff is fucking nasty.

Update: “I use small Macintosh apples,” e-mails Mom. Now you know.

Illustration by Susie Cagle.