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French Turnovers
Fill pie-tin with sliced apples, cover with pie-crust. Bake until the apples are soft.
Remove crust upside down to another pie-tin.
Season the apples with three-quarters cupful of sugar, butter size of walnut, and nutmeg. Pour this on the crust and serve with cream sweetened and seasoned with nutmeg.
— Miss F. Victoria Myers
A single-crust apple pie assembled backwards: the pastry bakes as a lid, is flipped onto a second tin, and the seasoned apples are spooned over it. The original assumes you know what a baked pie looks like, so the numbers below fill in the gaps.
- The hingeThe crust is inverted so that the side which sat over steaming apples ends up on the bottom. Do the flip while everything is hot and serve promptly, or the pastry will soften under the fruit and the point of the dish is lost.
- Pie-tinPeriod tins ran roughly 8 to 10 inches across and were generally shallow; a 9-inch tin is a reasonable choice. Having the second tin (or a serving platter) ready before the pie comes out makes the transfer easier.
- OvenNot stated. A moderately hot oven, around 400F, until the crust is set and colored will do; the apples underneath need to be soft, so test them and lower the heat if the pastry is coloring faster than the fruit softens.
- Butter size of a walnutAbout 1 tablespoon.
- The sugarThree-quarters of a cupful suits genuinely sour cooking apples. With modern Galas or Fujis, start at a third of a cup and taste.
- ApplesUse a variety that holds up and turns tart-soft rather than watery: Northern Spy, Granny Smith, Rhode Island Greening. Slice thin and heap the tin full, since the fruit shrinks as it cooks.
- Seasoning while hotSugar, butter and nutmeg go into the cooked apples, not under the crust. Fold them through while the fruit is still steaming so the butter melts and the sugar dissolves instead of staying grainy.
- The creamThe recipe specifies only cream, sweetened and seasoned with nutmeg. Heavy cream with a spoonful of sugar and a scrape of fresh nutmeg, stirred and poured, is the simplest reading.
- YieldSix modest servings from a 9-inch tin. It does not keep or reheat, and the crust softens quickly once the fruit is on it.
The name is loose. A turnover in most nineteenth-century American books is a folded half-moon of pastry, but the word also carried its plain literal sense, and here it describes the pie being turned over out of its tin. The method itself is old and thrifty: an apple pie with no bottom crust uses half the pastry and avoids the sodden underside that plagued wet fruit in an uneven wood-fired oven. The recipe comes to us under a single contributor's name, which may be why the instructions assume a shared understanding of ovens, tins and apple varieties that no longer holds. The cream is sweetened and flavored with nutmeg rather than vanilla.