Pare and slice apples and lay them in a buttered pie-dish. Sprinkle with brown sugar; add the juice and rind of ½ of a lemon, a pinch of cinnamon and cloves. Then cover with a rich pie-paste and let bake until done.
July 4 — No. 4
Irish
A one-crust deep-dish apple pudding, given in the terse style of its era: no quantities, no oven setting, no time. The proportions below are the conventional ones for a dish of this kind.
- QuantitiesFor a 9-inch pie dish, figure about 2 lb of firm tart apples (Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy), 1/2 to 3/4 cup brown sugar depending on the fruit, and roughly 1/4 teaspoon each of cinnamon and ground cloves. "A pinch" in these books is genuinely elastic; cloves are strong, so err low.
- "Pie-dish" means deepAn English or Irish pie dish is an oval earthenware bowl with a broad rim, deeper than an American pie plate. Pile the apples above the rim so the crust has something to rest on as the fruit collapses; a shallow tin gives you a flat, soggy result.
- "Rich pie-paste"Shortcrust with a high proportion of butter, near 1 part fat to 2 parts flour, rolled to about 1/4 inch. Only the top is crusted here, so make half the pastry you would for a double-crust pie.
- "Bake until done"No oven setting or time is given. A workable modern equivalent is a hot oven to set the pastry, then moderate: about 425F for the first 15 minutes, then 350F for a further 35 to 45 minutes, until the crust is browned and a skewer slips through the apples without resistance.
- Lemon rindPare the zest in strips with a peeler or grate it finely, avoiding the white pith. Half a lemon gives roughly a tablespoon of juice and something over a teaspoon of zest, depending on the fruit.
- Vent the crustThe apples throw off a great deal of steam. Cut two or three slits in the lid, or the pastry will lift off the fruit and set as a dome over an empty gap.
- Yield and servingServes six. Hot, with cream, custard or a spoonful of cold thick cream that melts into the crust.
The compiler's "Irish" is the nationality label attached to each day's dish in this book, and the dish itself belongs to a familiar type: a deep dish of apples under a pastry lid, common across Ireland and northern Britain, where the terms pudding, pie and tart were often used loosely for much the same thing. Books arranged as a dish a day with a nationality attached to each -- July 3 Turkish, July 5 Indian -- reflect a taste for cosmopolitan home cooking, in which a lemon rind or a pinch of cloves might stand in for a whole cuisine. The brevity is characteristic of the form: the flavouring and the fruit are specified, and everything else -- thickness of pastry, heat of oven, time -- is left to the cook.