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Apple Tart, Economical
Take three-quarters of a pound of flour: mix with it a tea-spoonful of baking powder, and a little salt; rub well in six ounces of clarified beef dripping, and make it into a paste with cold water. Roll it out two or three times. Line the edge of a pie-dish with a little paste about a quarter of an inch thick. Wet it all round to make the cover adhere. Pare, core, and quarter a dozen apples. Put them into the dish with a little moist sugar, a couple of cloves, and a table-spoonful of water. Cover it over with paste. Trim it nicely round the edges. Make a hole in the middle for the steam to escape, and bake in a good oven. Time to bake, one hour. Sufficient for six persons. Probable cost, 10d.
A plain dripping-crust apple pie, and the crust is where the character lies. Beef dripping makes a short, savoury-edged pastry that behaves much like lard.
- The fatClarified beef dripping is beef fat rendered and strained clean of meat solids and water. Lard or a firm vegetable shortening substitutes directly at 6 oz (170 g); butter will work but gives a softer, less flaky result and needs a little less water.
- WeightsThree-quarters of a pound of flour is 12 oz, about 340 g or roughly 2 3/4 cups. Cold water to bind will be somewhere between 5 and 7 tablespoons depending on the flour.
- "A good oven"For a covered fruit pie this implies a fairly brisk heat; modern editors usually render it as roughly 400-425F (200-220C). The recipe gives one hour at a single heat and no second temperature, but if the pastry is colouring too fast you can drop to about 350F (180C) for the remainder.
- Keep the fat coldDripping softens fast at room temperature. Chill it, rub it in quickly, and rest the rolled paste in the refrigerator before it goes on the dish, or the crust will be tough rather than short.
- A dozen applesReckon on about 2 to 2 1/2 lb (1-1.2 kg) prepared weight of a tart cooking variety such as Bramley or Granny Smith, heaped well above the rim since it collapses.
- Sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar. Two to three ounces (55-85 g) suits a sharp apple; taste a raw slice and judge.
- The two clovesWhole cloves are potent and go on infusing during baking; two is enough to scent the whole dish. Leave them whole so they can be found and set aside at the table.
- The pastry rimLining only the edge of the dish, not the base, is the classic English deep-dish method. The strip gives the lid something to seal against and keeps it from sliding into the fruit as the apples shrink.
- ServingSix portions, as stated. Best warm rather than hot, with cream or custard.
Cassell's prices the whole pie at tenpence and says so on the page, which is the point of the word *economical* in the title: this is the same deep-dish apple pie found throughout nineteenth-century English cookery, but built on beef dripping saved from the roast rather than on butter or lard bought in. Dripping was a mainstay household fat in Victorian Britain, collected under the joint, clarified by boiling with water and letting it set, and used for frying, for spreading on bread and for pastry of exactly this kind. The rim-only lining, the steam hole and the whole cloves are all conventions of the English fruit pie as it had settled by the mid-1800s, when apples were among the cheapest and longest-keeping fruits available to a town kitchen.