Home › Pastry › Sliced-Apple Pie
Sliced-Apple Pie
Line pie-pan with crust, sprinkle with sugar, fill with tart apples sliced very thin, sprinkle sugar and a very little cinnamon over them, and add a few small bits of butter, and a table-spoon water; dredge in flour, cover with the top crust, and bake half to three-quarters of an hour; allow four or five table-spoons sugar to one pie. Or, line pans with crust, fill with sliced apples, put on top crust and bake; take off top crust, put in sugar, bits of butter and seasoning, replace crust and serve warm. It is delicious with sweetened cream. Crab-apple pie, if made of "Transcendents," will fully equal those made of larger varieties of the apple. - Mrs. D. Buxton.
A plain double-crust apple pie of the sort that assumed the cook already knew her pastry. The instructions omit an oven temperature and any flour quantity, so a few decisions have to be made before you start.
- Oven temperatureBuckeye Cookery expected a wood range and gave no number. Bake at 425F for the first 20 minutes to set and brown the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for the remainder. The stated half to three-quarters of an hour is realistic only if the apples are genuinely sliced very thin.
- "Dredge in flour"This means scattering flour over the filling as a thickener, not coating anything. Use 1 to 2 tablespoons for a 9-inch pie, more if the apples are very juicy.
- Sugar quantityFour or five tablespoons per pie is a quarter to a third of a cup, noticeably less than modern apple pie recipes use. It works with a sharply tart apple such as Bramley, Granny Smith or Northern Spy; with a sweet dessert apple the pie will be cloying.
- Sugar under the fruitThe recipe sprinkles the bottom crust with sugar before filling. No reason is given; it sweetens and lightly caramelizes the base.
- The lift-off-lid methodThe second version bakes the apples plain, then removes the top crust to add sugar, butter and spice before replacing it. Cut the lid free with a thin knife around the rim and lift it in one piece; it is easier if the crust was scored before baking. Serve this version warm, as directed, since the lid will not reseal.
- Crab apples"Transcendent" is a nineteenth-century crab apple cultivar, still grown by heritage orchards but not sold commercially. Any culinary crab apple can be substituted; peel, core and expect to raise the sugar substantially, as crabs are far more acid.
- Sweetened creamPouring cream with a little sugar stirred in, not whipped. Lightly whipped cream or unsweetened heavy cream both stand in.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Marysville, Ohio, in 1877, assembled from contributions by named local women, which is why this entry ends with Mrs. D. Buxton rather than an anonymous house voice. Two things suggest its period: the very light hand with sugar and cinnamon, and the confidence that a reader would know what a "Transcendent" crab apple was. Transcendent was one of the widely planted Siberian crab hybrids of the period. The lift-the-lid variation, adding sugar and butter after baking, would help keep a top crust crisp and is a reminder that pie in this era was often served warm from the oven rather than cooled and cut for keeping.