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Apple Pie
Use Crisco Plain Paste. For filling for a medium-sized pie tin, use 3 cups pared and sliced apples, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/8 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, and grated rind of 1/2 lemon.
This is a promotional recipe: it assumes you have already turned to the book's "Crisco Plain Paste" and that you know what a pie looks like when it is done. Everything it leaves out is standard practice for 1915, so here are the missing numbers.
- Crisco Plain PasteThe book's basic pastry, given elsewhere in the volume; a typical all-shortening paste of the period runs to about 2 cups flour, 2/3 cup shortening, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 4-5 tablespoons ice water, enough for a double crust. Any all-shortening or shortening-and-butter crust behaves the same way here.
- "Medium-sized pie tin"An 8- or 9-inch shallow tin, not a modern deep-dish plate. Three cups of sliced apples fills that barely; in a deep 9-inch dish you want 5 to 6 cups, and the sugar, salt and spice scaled up by about half.
- No oven temperature is givenStart at 425F for 15 minutes to set and colour the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for 35 to 45 minutes, until juice bubbles thickly through the vents. A pale crust means an underbaked base.
- No thickenerThere is no flour, cornstarch or tapioca in the filling. Firm keeping apples of the period gave up less juice than many modern varieties; with supermarket apples expect a loose, wet pie, and a tablespoon of flour or cornstarch tossed with the sugar solves it.
- Apple choiceFirm tart cooking apples such as Baldwin, Rhode Island Greening or Northern Spy were widely grown and used in this period. Granny Smith, Braeburn or a mix of tart and firm-sweet is the closest modern equivalent. Red Delicious bakes mealy and is a poor choice.
- The tablespoon of CriscoAlmost certainly meant to be dotted over the apples before the top crust goes on, the way butter is used in apple pies; the recipe only lists it among the filling ingredients.
- LemonBoth juice and grated rind are doing real work here in place of extra spice — the rind especially. Zest it before juicing.
- Yield and servingSix modest wedges from an 8-inch pie. Cool at least an hour before cutting or the filling will run, since nothing is binding it.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco — hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a clean, odourless substitute for lard — in 1911. Books like this one were the marketing: a full year of menus in which every pastry, every fried dish and even, as here, the dot of fat on an apple filling calls for the product by name. That explains both the brevity of the recipe and the odd instruction to put a tablespoon of shortening where a cook would ordinarily reach for butter. The pie itself is entirely conventional American apple pie of the period, leaning on lemon juice and rind rather than a heavy hand of spice, and trusting the baker to know how long a pie takes. Its appearance under a heading marked "Eggs" may well be an artefact of how the original volume was set and indexed rather than anything to do with the dish, though that is only a guess.