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Apple Pie (Core peel and cut in halves)
Core, peel and cut in halves 8 tart apples. Line pie plate with Crisco pastry, and fill with apples; sprinkle over 3 tablespoons sugar, 1/2 teaspoonful cinnamon, or nutmeg and cloves, and 2 tablespoons Crisco in small pieces. Bake till apples are soft, then, at the last moment cover with 1 cupful whipped cream, and send to table.
A single-crust apple pie from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional books, with no oven temperature and no timing beyond "till apples are soft." A few decisions have to be made for it.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Standard practice for a shortening pastry is 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and brown the crust, then 350F until the fruit yields. Expect 45 to 60 minutes in total with the apples in halves.
- Halved apples, not slicedThis is the unusual instruction and the one that governs the bake. Whole halves take far longer to soften than slices and will sit proud of the plate; set them cut side down and give them room. If you would rather have a conventional pie, slice them and cut the time to roughly 40 minutes.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated since this book's day to remove trans fats; the current product is close enough for pastry, if not identical. Any solid vegetable shortening works. Butter can be substituted, though it carries water that shortening does not, so the dough will handle differently.
- The sugar is lowThree tablespoons across eight apples is very little by modern taste, and the book assumes genuinely tart cooking apples. With Granny Smith or Bramley it is defensible; with a supermarket eating apple, increase it to a third of a cup or the pie will taste flat.
- Spice quantities"1/2 teaspoonful cinnamon, or nutmeg and cloves" means half a teaspoon of one or the other, not of each. Cloves are strong: if you take the second option, use a scant quarter teaspoon of nutmeg and a pinch of cloves.
- The whipped creamIt goes on after baking, off the heat, and is not browned. Whip a cup of heavy cream to soft peaks while the pie cools slightly, spread it at the table, and serve at once, or it will slump into the hot fruit.
- Pie plate and yieldA pie plate of this period is likely to be in the 9-inch range, though sizes varied. One pastry round lines it; there is no top crust. Six servings is a reasonable estimate, though the book gives none.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company introduced in 1911. That accounts for the brand name appearing twice in four lines of an otherwise unremarkable apple pie: the books of this period were built to demonstrate that a vegetable fat could do everything lard and butter did, and pastry was the hardest case to argue. The recipe itself is older than the shortening. Open-faced apple pies finished with cream rather than a top crust appear in nineteenth-century American and English cookery books, and leaving the fruit in halves rather than slices turns up in earlier recipes too.