Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (US) nonsense, balderdash; anything banal or out of date.

1920		T.A. Dorgan in Zwilling TAD Lex. (1993) 15: Miss Applesauce, I want you to meet my friends.
1925		R. Lardner ‘Zone of Quiet’ in Coll. Short Stories (1941) 71: I wasn’t born yesterday and I know apple sauce when I hear it and I bet you’ve told that to fifty girls.
1934		Wodehouse Right Ho, Jeeves 106: I had given [...] little credence, considering it the unbalanced apple sauce of a bereaved man.
1937		Harper’s Mag. n.d.: Karl Marx [...] called these loose floating ideas ideologies [...] which freely translated into American means ‘applesauce’ [W&F].
1944		S.J. Perelman One Touch of Venus 100: Thanks for saying it, Mr. Savory — but — but — that’s a lot of applesauce.
1960		Wodehouse Jeeves in the Offing 48: Apple sauce, in my opinion.
1989		H. Rawson Dict. of Invective (1991) 14: Foods also serve as metaphors for nonsense, e.g., applesauce, baloney, banana oil, beans, mush, pap, and tripe.
2000		(con. 1940s–60s) Décharné Straight from the Fridge Dad 4: Applesauce Flattery, insincere praise, a load of old flannel eg: ‘Don’t hand me that applesauce, Pops’.
2005		J. Stahl I, Fatty 178: Maude was a bad bag of applesauce.

2. (US) anything easy.

1967

in DARE.