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Sham Apple Pie
Fill a deep pie plate with sliced apples, then cover with a good rich pie crust (no upper crust); after the pie is baked, break the crust in with the apples cut up fine; mix in well a cup of sugar a tablespoon melted butter and one teaspoon of ground cinnamon, put in a pudding dish and press. When cold cut in slices and eat cream on it if you like. You may need more sugar and spice as some apples are more tart than others.
This is a pandowdy in all but name: the crust is baked over the fruit, then broken down into it and pressed into a mould. A few things the original leaves unstated.
- The hinge: break the crust in while hotThe hinge: break the crust in while the pie is still hot -- the recipe says only "after the pie is baked," but the juices need to be loose enough to soak the pastry, and a cooled pie is likelier to give soggy shards in dry fruit than a single pressed mass.
- The crust arrangement"Cover with a good rich pie crust (no upper crust)" reads oddly to modern eyes. The likeliest sense is a single sheet of pastry laid over the apples in the plate, with no bottom crust to line it, though the wording is ambiguous.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Start at 425F for about 15 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then drop to 350F for 30-40 minutes until the apples are collapsing and bubbling at the edges.
- ApplesUse a variety that breaks down — Bramley, McIntosh, Cortland. The recipe's own note about tartness is the important one: taste after mixing and adjust the sugar, since the fruit is the whole substance of the dish.
- PressingTurn the hot mixture into a loaf tin or small pudding basin, cover with a plate and weight it (a couple of tins will do). It needs several hours cold, ideally overnight, before it will slice cleanly.
- Sugar and butter quantitiesA cup of sugar and a tablespoon of melted butter are added to the whole pie, not per apple. The recipe gives no plate size; a deep 9-inch plate would take roughly 2 lb of sliced fruit.
- Yield and servingRoughly six to eight slices, depending on the dish. Serve cold, as directed; cream is optional in the original ("if you like"), and lightly whipped cream or creme fraiche also works.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks are full of "sham," "mock" and "poor man's" dishes, where the name often signals not a substitute ingredient so much as a departure from the expected form -- here, a pie deliberately wrecked and reset as a sliceable pudding. Chopping a baked top crust down into the fruit beneath it is the technique called "dowdying" in apple pandowdy, though the origin of the name is uncertain; pressing the result cold to be cut in slices puts this closer to a charlotte or a brown betty in the finished eating. The closing note that "you may need more sugar and spice as some apples are more tart than others" is a reminder of how much orchard fruit varied before a handful of commercial varieties dominated the market.