Line a well-buttered pudding-dish with a rich pie-paste and cover with a layer of sliced apples. Sprinkle with cinnamon, grated lemon peel and small bits of butter, and moisten with white wine; then cover with a layer of the paste and fill with another layer of apples, nuts and raisins, a tablespoonful of syrup, the juice of ½ lemon and bits of butter. Cover with the top crust; press in the edges with a beaten egg, and rub the top with butter. Let bake in a moderate oven until done.
A double-decked apple pie baked in a deep dish, with a middle crust dividing two fillings. The instructions assume a cook who already knows pastry, so the gaps are mostly in quantities and timing.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as about 350F. Given the depth and the wet fruit, start at 400F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for the remainder.
- Baking time"Until done" means 50 to 65 minutes total for a dish of this depth. The top should be well browned and the juices visibly bubbling at the edge; the middle crust will stay soft.
- The dishA pudding-dish is a deep, straight-sided baking dish, not a shallow pie plate. A 2-quart round casserole or a deep 9-inch dish holds the three layers without spilling.
- "Syrup"Genuinely ambiguous here. It could mean molasses, corn syrup, or a plain sugar syrup; any of them works, but molasses will dominate the lemon and wine, so a light syrup or honey is the safer reading.
- ApplesUse a firm cooking apple such as Bramley, Granny Smith or Northern Spy, sliced thin. Softer dessert apples collapse into liquid and will waterlog the middle crust.
- White wineA dry white, used only to moisten, perhaps 2 to 3 tablespoons over the lower layer. Anything sweet will push the whole pie over, since raisins and syrup are already in the upper layer.
- Sealing the edgesBeaten egg is being used as glue, not glaze, on the rim. Rubbing the top with butter rather than egg gives a matte, flaky crust; brush with egg instead if you want gloss.
- Quantities and yieldFigure on pastry for a triple crust (roughly 1.5 times a standard two-crust recipe), about 2 lb of apples in total, and a generous half cup between the nuts and raisins. Serves 8, warm rather than hot.
Shallet, more often spelled schalet, is the German-Jewish name for a family of Sabbath puddings, and the word is generally traced to the same root as cholent, the slow-cooked Sabbath stew, from an Old French term for "warm" or "heated". Both dishes solved the same problem: no cooking on the Sabbath, so the food went into a slow oven on Friday and came out warm on Saturday. Over time schalet in Central European kitchens drifted toward the sweet end, and an apple version thick with raisins, nuts and lemon became a familiar dessert in German and Austrian Jewish households, well enough known outside them that Heinrich Heine wrote a mock-hymn to schalet in his poem "Prinzessin Sabbat". By the time this recipe was collected into an American day-by-day compendium of national dishes, the long slow bake had shortened to an ordinary moderate oven and the pudding had become, in effect, a deep apple pie with an extra crust running through its middle.