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Mother's Apple Pie
Peel and quarter five large greening apples, put into a saucepan and sprinkle one and one-fourth cups of sugar over them, add one-half cup of boiling water, cover tightly and boil until apples are cooked to pieccs; then stir with a fork and while hot put into crust made as follows:
Into one cup of flour rub or cut one-half cup of lard and onehalf teaspoon of salt; mix lightly with a scant fourth of a cup of cold water; sprinkle apple with nutmeg, put on upper crust and bake in hot oven fifteen minutes or until crust is done.
— Mrs. John E. Newkirk
A cooked-filling pie, closer to an applesauce pie than the sliced-apple kind, with a very short lard crust. A few of the quantities need reading carefully before you start.
- The hinge: cook the filling down, not just softThe apples are meant to collapse entirely ("cooked to pieces"). Note that the pan is covered, so the water and the juice the apples give up will not reduce much; if there is free liquid when you take it off the heat, keep cooking uncovered or the bottom crust will be soaked before the pie ever reaches the oven.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400-450F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is enough only because the filling is already cooked; the bake is for the pastry alone.
- GreeningsMost likely the Rhode Island Greening, a firm, sharply tart cooking apple still grown in the Northeast and sold at orchards in autumn, though "greening" was also used loosely for green cooking apples. Granny Smith is the closest supermarket stand-in. With a sweeter apple, cut the sugar to about three-quarters of a cup.
- How much crust this makesOne cup of flour with half a cup of lard yields roughly enough for a single crust. The instruction to "put on upper crust" assumes a bottom shell is already in the pan, so double the pastry quantities if you want both, or bake it as a top-crust-only pie in a deep dish.
- The fat ratioHalf a cup of lard to one cup of flour is a very high proportion by modern standards and gives an extremely short, crumbly pastry that tears easily. Work it cold and quickly, and expect to patch it rather than lift it in one piece.
- Filling the shell hotHot sauce against raw pastry starts softening it immediately. Let the apples cool to warm, cap and vent the top crust, and get the pie into a fully preheated oven without delay.
- NutmegFreshly grated is a different spice from the pre-ground tin; the recipe only says "sprinkle," so a light grating over the surface is all that is called for.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch pie, six modest slices. Serve barely warm; the filling sets as it cools.
Community cookbooks like this one were often assembled to raise money for a church, a library or a hospital ward: contributions gathered from local households, each signed with the contributor's name as both credit and warranty. "Receipt" was the ordinary English word for a cooking formula for centuries before "recipe" displaced it, and it lingered longest in exactly this kind of provincial American printing. The Rhode Island Greening was valued because it holds acidity and breaks down cleanly into sauce rather than staying in slices. Cooking the fruit before it goes into the shell has the practical advantage that the baker need only judge the pastry, not the fruit, and can pull the pie the moment the crust colors.