Apple Pie
5 tart apples. 1/2 cup sugar. 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. 1/8 teaspoon salt. 1 1/4 tablespoons butter. 1 tablespoon lemon juice.
Grated rind ¼ lemon.
PROCESS: Line a pie pan with Plain Paste. Wipe, pare, core and cut apples in quarters, then in slices lengthwise. Pile them in lined pie pan, heaping them well in center, leaving a half-inch space around edge of pie. Mix sugar, nutmeg, salt, lemon juice, grated rind and turn over apples. Dot over with bits of butter; wet edges and cover with top crust; press and flute edges. Bake forty-five minutes in a moderate oven.
The ingredient list as printed is a fragment — the apples, sugar and nutmeg are all named in the method but their amounts were lost in the original typesetting. What follows fills the gaps and translates the rest.
- The missing quantitiesThe page gives no amounts for apples, sugar or nutmeg. For a double-crust pie of the usual size, something like 2 lb of apples (6 to 7 cups sliced), 3/4 cup sugar and 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg will work; this is a reconstruction, not a reading of the original.
- "1/4 tablespoons butter"Garbled; read it as roughly 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons. A tablespoon or two dotted over the fruit is enough, since the apples supply their own moisture.
- "Grated rind 14 lemon"Read this as the grated rind of 1/4 lemon — roughly 1/2 teaspoon of zest. Take only the yellow, since the white pith is bitter.
- Plain PasteA cross-reference to the book's basic pie pastry, which is not reproduced here; enough is needed for a top and bottom crust. Any standard butter or lard double-crust dough stands in.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350 to 375F. The stated forty-five minutes may not be enough for a pie heaped this high, so judge by the fruit being tender and the juice bubbling thickly rather than by the clock.
- Why the half-inch border mattersLeaving the fruit clear of the rim gives the two crusts a clean seal, which is what keeps the juice inside instead of running out and welding the pie to the pan. Wet the lower edge before laying on the top crust.
- Cut a ventThe original does not mention one. Slashing the top crust before baking lets steam escape instead of lifting the lid away from the fruit.
- Apple choiceFirm tart varieties such as Granny Smith, Northern Spy or Braeburn hold their slices; softer eating apples collapse into sauce and leave a gap under the crust.
- YieldOne pie; the original does not give a pan size. Six to eight servings. Cool at least an hour before cutting so the juices set.
The formula is the standard American raw-fruit pie -- sliced apples, sugar, a little butter and nutmeg, with no thickener at all -- which is why the instruction to heap the apples in the center matters, since the fruit shrinks appreciably as it cooks and the top crust has nothing else to rest on. Lemon juice and rind were a common corrective for bland or over-sweet apples, and nutmeg was at least as usual as cinnamon in older English and New England apple pies. The mangled ingredient list is a typesetting failure: fractions were the first thing to go wrong in these books.