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APPLE PASTY (or TURNOVER)
Make a short crust with half a pound of flour, two ounces of butter, two ounces of lard, and a little salt. Rub the butter thoroughly into the flour, mix it with very little water, and roll it out thin on the pastry-board. Stamp out with a small cup-plate as many rounds as you wish to make pasties. Moisten the inside of the round; lay stewed apples, sweetened and flavoured, on one half, and lift the other half right over it. Press the edges, and bake in a quick oven. A plain and very nice crust may be made with good beef dripping and a little baking-powder. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour. This will make a dozen pasties. Serve one or two for each persons. Probable cost, 1d. each.
A straightforward shortcrust turnover; the only real difficulties are the imperial weights and the vague oven.
- Quantities in metric/USHalf a pound of flour is about 225 g, or a scant 2 cups; 2 oz each of butter and lard is 55 g each (4 tablespoons). The recipe specifies 'very little water' — add cold water a spoonful at a time, only enough to bring the dough together.
- "A quick oven"Usually read as somewhere around 425F (220C), though period oven terms map only loosely onto modern dials. Fifteen minutes at that heat suits pastry this thin — the filling is already cooked, so you are only setting and browning the crust.
- Lard and beef drippingBoth give a short crust, and the dripping variation gives a savoury edge; the recipe pairs it with 'a little' baking-powder to lighten it, which for this quantity of flour means roughly half a teaspoon. Modern shortening can be substituted.
- The hinge: cook the apples firstThese are filled with stewed apple, not raw slices. Stew and sweeten the apples in advance and let them cool completely — warm filling melts the fat in the crust and the pasty leaks.
- "A small cup-plate"A cup-plate was a small plate, generally about 3 to 4 inches across, smaller than a saucer. A cutter of that size, or an upturned glass, should give something close to the twelve rounds the recipe promises.
- "Moisten the inside"Brush the round lightly with water, not egg, before folding; water is what makes the crimped edge weld. Press with a fork or thumb, and cut one small vent in each.
- FlavouringThe book leaves "flavoured" to the cook. Cloves, lemon peel and cinnamon are all common period flavourings for stewed apple; a strip of lemon rind stewed with the apples and then removed is one option.
- YieldTwelve small pasties, one or two per person, so six to twelve servings. They are best warm on the day they are baked.
The pasty in Cassell's sense is simply pastry folded over a filling and baked without a dish — a cheap form of pie, made when a household had a board and an oven but no spare tins. The turnover shape survived longest in regions where food travelled to work with the worker, Cornwall most famously, though sweet fruit turnovers were baked all over Britain. The costing line is the period's signature: Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, aimed at middle-class households running on a fixed budget in the 1870s and after, priced nearly every dish, and a penny apiece marked this as an economical way to use windfall apples and the dripping jar. The alternative crust of beef dripping and baking powder is a glimpse of the same recipe as it was actually made in poorer kitchens, where butter was a luxury and chemical raising agents were still a comparatively recent convenience.