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Cream Apple Pie
One cup of applesauce, one teaspoon of lemon extract, onehalf cup of sugar, one-half cup of water, two teaspoons of cornstarch.. Line pie dish with rich crust and bake, then add filling and cover with meringue made of whites of two eggs and one tablespoon of powdered sugar.
— Miss Hazel E. Smith
A thrifty applesauce pie dressed up with meringue. The receipt assumes you know two things it never says: the filling has to be cooked on the stove before it goes into the shell, and the shell is baked blind first.
- Cook the filling firstWhisk the cornstarch into the cold water, combine with the applesauce and sugar, and cook over medium heat, stirring, until it thickens and turns glossy — two to three minutes past the boil so the starch loses its raw taste. Stir the lemon extract in off the heat. Poured into a baked shell raw, it will never set.
- Blind-baking the shell"Line pie dish with rich crust and bake" means a fully baked empty shell: line with foil, weight it, 425F for about 15 minutes, then remove the weights and finish 10 minutes more until dry and browned. A pale shell goes soggy under a wet filling.
- Lemon extractA full teaspoon of modern commercial extract in one cup of filling reads as harsh and perfumed. Half a teaspoon, or the grated zest and a teaspoon of juice from a lemon, gives the brightness the receipt is after.
- ApplesaucePeriod applesauce would generally have been homemade, and was often only lightly sweetened. If you use sweetened jarred sauce, cut the half cup of sugar to a couple of tablespoons and taste the filling before it goes in.
- The meringue is under-sugared by modern standardsOne tablespoon of powdered sugar for two whites will foam but weeps and slumps quickly. Two tablespoons per white is the current ratio for a stable meringue; beat to stiff, glossy peaks and add the sugar gradually.
- Powdered sugarModern confectioners' sugar contains a little starch, which actually helps a meringue hold; nineteenth-century powdered sugar was generally just finely ground sugar. Superfine granulated works too, dissolved fully into the whites.
- Sealing and browningSpread the meringue so it touches the crust all the way around — that anchoring is what keeps it from shrinking into the middle. Bake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes until the peaks are tan.
- YieldOne pie of eight or nine inches, five or six modest slices — the receipt does not say. Cut with a wet knife and serve the day it is made; meringue over a starch filling turns beady overnight.
"Cream" here describes the texture, not the ingredients — there is no dairy in the pie at all. The name was often applied to smooth, starch-thickened fillings, the same logic that gives us cream pies flavored with lemon or chocolate, though many so-called cream pies did contain milk or cream; the meringue cap was a common finish for the family. What makes this one a village receipt is the applesauce: sauce was put up in quantity in autumn and kept on hand through the winter, so a cook could produce a pie without peeling anything. Community cookbooks of this kind were typically sold to raise money for a church, library or relief fund, and each contribution carried its author's name — Miss Hazel E. Smith's neighbors would have known exactly whose pie they were eating.