Home › Pastry › Apple Meringue Pie
Apple Meringue Pie
Pare, slice, stew and sweeten ripe, tart and juicy apples, mash and season with nutmeg, (or stew lemon peel with them for flavor), fill crust and bake till done; spread over the apple a thick meringue 派 made by whipping to froth whites of three eggs for each pie, sweetening with three table-spoons powdered sugar; flavor with vanilla, beat until it will stand alone, and cover pie three-quarters of an inch thick. Set back in a quick oven till well "set," and eat cold. In their season substitute peaches for apples.
A single-crust apple pie finished with a tall soft meringue. The instructions assume you know how to blind-work a crust and judge a meringue by eye, so the useful additions are numbers.
- The hinge: cook the filling firstThe apples are stewed, mashed and sweetened before they ever meet the pastry, so the bake is only about setting the crust and the meringue. Cool the apple to warm, not hot, before it goes in, or the meringue will weep where it meets the fruit.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives no temperature for the pie itself, only 'bake till done'; a hot start of around 425F for 10-15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then 350F until the pastry colours, is the usual modern equivalent. A 'quick oven' is conventionally reckoned at around 400-450F, which will brown the meringue in a few minutes; watch it, since three-quarters of an inch of meringue tips from gold to scorched quickly.
- Meringue proportionsThree egg whites and three tablespoons of powdered sugar per pie is a lean ratio by modern standards. 'Powdered sugar' in a book of this period usually meant finely ground granulated sugar, closer to today's superfine than to modern confectioners' sugar with its added cornstarch; superfine sugar at two tablespoons per white gives a meringue that holds better and weeps less.
- "Beat until it will stand alone"Stiff peaks that do not slump when the beater is lifted. Under-beaten meringue collapses in the oven, over-beaten meringue looks grainy and separates.
- Sealing the edgeSpread the meringue so it touches the crust all the way round. An unsealed meringue shrinks away from the rim as it cools and leaves a moat of liquid.
- ApplesTart and juicy means something like Bramley, Granny Smith or a firm russet. Modern dessert apples are much sweeter, so taste before adding sugar; roughly 2 lb of apples fills a 9-inch shell.
- Lemon peelStewing a strip of peel with the fruit, as the alternative flavouring suggests, works best if you take it out before mashing. Use unwaxed lemons and only the yellow zest.
- Serving"Eat cold" is sound advice: the filling firms as it cools and cuts cleanly. One 9-inch pie serves six to eight. Do not refrigerate uncovered overnight, as the meringue goes tacky.
Meringue-topped pies are often associated with the second half of the nineteenth century, when reliable wire whisks, cheap refined sugar and ovens with some measure of top heat all became common in American kitchens, though meringue-topped tarts and puddings appear earlier; whipped egg whites were also used as a cold "snow" spooned over creams and trifles. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio and first published in 1877, grew out of an earlier Marysville, Ohio fundraising cookbook associated with a Congregational church parsonage. It is a farm-belt book, and the recipe reflects that: a bushel of tart apples in the cellar, eggs from the yard, and a filling made from fruit already stewed rather than raw slices. The instruction to substitute peaches in their season is the same logic, since a household with a peach tree ate peaches for a few weeks and apples for the rest of the year. The odd stray character in the middle of the text is a scanning artefact from the original page, not part of the recipe.