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Apple Potpie
14 apples, peeled, cored, and sliced, 1 1/2 pints flour, 1 teaspoonful baking-powder, 1 cupful sugar, 1/2 cupful butter, 1 cupful milk, large pinch salt. Sift flour with powder and salt, rub in butter, cold; add milk, mix into dough as for tea-biscuits; with it line shallow stewpan to within two inches of bottom; pour in 1 1/2 cupfuls water, apples, and sugar; wet edges, and cover with rest of dough; put cover on, set it to boil twenty minutes, then place in moderate oven until apples are cooked; then remove from oven, cut top crust in four equal parts; dish apples, lay on them pieces of side crust cut in diamonds, and pieces of top crust on a plate; serve with cream.
A steamed-then-baked deep-dish apple pie, cooked in a lidded pan on the stove before it ever sees the oven. The dough is a biscuit dough, not a short pastry, and it wants to be handled accordingly.
- The hinge: steam first, bake secondThe twenty minutes of covered boiling sets the crust in steam and starts the apples; the oven only finishes them and dries the top. Skipping the stovetop stage gives a pale, sodden lid.
- Flour by volume1 1/2 pints is 3 cups, roughly 13 oz / 375 g. A cupful of butter is 8 oz, so 1/2 cupful is 4 oz / 115 g, one stick.
- "Moderate oven"350F / 175C. Twenty to thirty minutes is usually enough to cook the apples through and colour the crust.
- StewpanA wide, heavy pan with a well-fitting lid, deep enough to hold the fruit and take a lid without touching the crust. An enamelled cast-iron casserole works well.
- Lining the panThe instruction to line "to within two inches of the bottom" is ambiguous as written; the sense is that the dough lines the sides only, leaving the base bare so the fruit sits directly in the water and does not make a gummy under-crust. Two inches of bare pan at the bottom is the safest reading.
- Fourteen applesThat is about 4 to 4 1/2 lb / 2 kg prepared, filling a large pan. A firm cooking apple that holds its shape is wanted; a soft eating apple will collapse to sauce in the steam.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon for 3 cups of flour is light by modern standards; present-day biscuit doughs usually run nearer a teaspoon or more per cup. The crust here will be dense and dumpling-like rather than fluffy.
- ServingThe dish is deliberately taken apart at table: fruit into a bowl, side crust cut in diamonds laid over it, quartered top crust passed separately. The quantities would serve about eight, with pouring cream.
Potpie in nineteenth-century American usage often meant a dish boiled or steamed under a crust in a pot rather than baked in a pie dish, and the term covered savoury and sweet versions alike; a fruit potpie of this kind needs no oven at all in its simplest form. Its lineage is usually traced to English suet and dumpling puddings carried over by settlers, with the crust here raised with baking powder in place of those older doughs. The dismantling at the end, apples dished and crust laid over in diamonds, is a touch of table presentation on an otherwise plain dish.