Line a deep pie-dish with a rich pie-crust. Chop 4 apples very fine and mix with sugar, cinnamon, lemon-juice and ½ cup of currants. Then mix with the yolks of 2 eggs well beaten. Fill the pie and bake until done. Beat the whites with pulverized sugar and spread on the pie. Let get light brown on top.
The original gives no quantities for sugar, cinnamon or lemon, and no temperature at all. What follows fills the gaps a competent cook would otherwise have to guess at.
- The missing amountsFor four apples, figure on 1/2 to 2/3 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and the juice of half a lemon. The book assumes a cook who sweetens to taste; taste the raw filling and adjust before the yolks go in.
- "Bake until done"A single-crust fruit pie of this kind wants a hot start and a moderate finish: 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then 350F for 30 to 40 minutes until the apple is tender and the custard set. The filling is thickened only by egg yolk, so it must actually set before the meringue goes on.
- Chop, do not sliceThe recipe says "Chop 4 apples very fine." Finely chopped apple cooks through in the time the crust needs and binds with the yolks into something closer to a custard than a slab of fruit. Sliced apple is likelier to leave the pie loose.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. If the only ones you can find are hard, steep them in hot water or a little lemon juice for ten minutes and drain.
- Apple choiceA firm tart apple holds its shape and balances the sugar: Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Sweet soft varieties turn to sauce and make the filling cloying.
- The meringueTwo whites take about 4 tablespoons of powdered ("pulverized") sugar, beaten to stiff, glossy peaks. Spread it so it touches the crust all round, which stops it shrinking, and brown it at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, or 425F for 5 if you want a darker top and a softer interior.
- Dish and yieldThe book says only "a deep pie-dish"; something near a 9-inch plate with sloping sides is a fair modern equivalent. Serves six to eight. Meringue-topped pies do not keep; cut it the day it is made.
The 365-dishes format was a fixture of American home libraries in the first decades of the twentieth century, a dish for every day of the year, each tagged with a nationality. The tags were loose. What is called "French" here is essentially a meringue-crowned apple custard tart rather than the pate brisee and sliced-apple arrangement of a formal tarte aux pommes. The two yolks in the filling leave two whites for the topping, though whether thrift or fashion prompted the meringue is not recorded. Currants and cinnamon with apple is older than either label, appearing in English and northern European apple pies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.