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Flour Mixtures Continued: Pastry and Pies: Apple
APPLE PIE Take a little more than one-half of the pastry, made by either of the above recipes. If the first be selected, turn it over on the board dredged with flour, knead slightly to get into a compact mass, then roll into a round to fit the plate; lift the paste to the plate (agate preferred) and trim so as to leave one-fourth an inch of paste beyond the plate. Pare five or six tart apples and slice them into the plate. Use enough apples to round the slices up well. Mix one-fourth a teaspoonful of salt with two-thirds a cup of sugar and sprinkle over the apple; put on one teaspoonful or more of butter, in little bits, here and there, add a grating of nutmeg, then roll out the rest of the crust in the same manner as the first and cut six or eight half-inch slits in the center to form a design; leave the paste on the board while the edge of the pastry on the plate is brushed over with cold water, then put about three tablespoonfuls of cold water over the apple. Lift the pastry from the board and set it over the apple, letting it lie loosely, as it will shrink in banking. Press the edge of the upper piece of paste upon the edge of the lower and trim if needed to make them even. Then brush the two edges together with cold water and bake about half an hour. The oven should not be too hot or the pastry will brown before it is cooked. After the pie has been in the oven six or seven minutes, the paste should have contracted and risen somewhat. ENGLISH APPLE PIE Butter a shallow agate dish. Select one that is deeper than a pie plate. Slice apples into the dish to fill it. Sprinkle on about a cup of sugar, half a teaspoonful of salt and a grating of nutmeg or lemon rind. Put on two teaspoonfuls of butter in bits, here and there, add two or three tablespoonfuls cold water, then roll out half of the quantity of paste indicated in the above recipes. Cut slits in the paste and spread it over the apple, pressing it against the dish on the edge. Bake about forty minutes. Serve with or without cream.
APPLE PIE WITH MERINGUE Bake the crust as for "Cranberry Tart," page 319. Set the cooked pastry in a suitable plate and fill two-thirds full with sifted apple sauce, reduced by cooking till quite thick. Cover with meringue and let bake eight or ten minutes in a very moderate oven.
Meringue Whites of 2 eggs, beaten dry sugar 4 tablespoonfuls of granulated 1/2 teaspoonful of vanilla Beat two tablespoonfuls of the sugar into the whites, beaten dry, then fold in the rest of the sugar and the vanilla. After the meringue is spread, sift granulated sugar over it. The oven must be moderate. The meringue should not color until after eight minutes.
BLUEBERRY PIE Line the plate as for an apple pie; mix one pint of berries, two tablespoonfuls of flour, half a teaspoonful of salt and three-fourths a cup of sugar and turn into the plate, put on two teaspoonfuls of butter in little bits, then cover with the second crust and finish as the apple pie with two crusts. All pies are less liable to "run out" in the oven, if the paste be put on loosely. Allow plenty of paste, that the plate may be covered when the paste shrinks.
A group of small two-crust and deep-dish fruit pies from a book scaled for a household of two, which means smaller plates and shorter bakes than most modern pie recipes assume. A few of the terms and one of the oven directions need translating.
- Plate size and yieldThe book is written for two people, though it does not specify a plate size here; five or six apples will fill a small to medium plate. Judge quantity by the instruction to "round the slices up well" rather than by a fixed measurement.
- "Agate" dishesAgate is speckled enamelled steel, common cheap bakeware of the period. The recipe marks it as preferred but gives no reason. Any metal, glass or ceramic pie plate works; glass and dark metal brown the bottom crust best.
- Baking timeHalf an hour is short by current practice. Bake until the juices bubble thickly through the slits and a knife meets no resistance in the apple; thicker slices or a deeper pile of fruit may want considerably longer.
- "Shrink in banking"A printer's error for "baking." The instruction it belongs to is sound and is repeated at the end: lay the top crust on loosely and allow surplus paste, because pastry contracts as the fat melts and a tightly stretched lid tears and lets the juice out.
- The apples"Tart apples" means sour ones; firm varieties such as Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy or Bramley hold their shape best, while soft modern dessert apples break down. Two-thirds of a cup of sugar is generous if the fruit is not genuinely sour.
- No thickener in the apple pieThe apple pie contains no thickener, while the blueberry filling carries two tablespoonfuls of flour. If your apples are juicy, a tablespoon of flour or two teaspoons of cornstarch mixed with the sugar will prevent a flooded plate.
- English apple pieA deep-dish pie with a single top crust, using only half the pastry; the recipe calls for a shallow agate dish deeper than a pie plate. Bake about forty minutes, until the apples are tender to a skewer through a slit.
- The meringue pie"Bake the crust as for Cranberry Tart" means an empty shell baked first, so line and weight it. "Whites beaten dry" means beaten stiff, past the soft-peak stage. A "very moderate oven" is a low one -- the recipe's own test is that the meringue should not colour until after eight minutes. Soft meringue weeps if refrigerated; serve it the day it is made.
Cooking for Two (1909) is generally credited to Janet McKenzie Hill, founder of the Boston Cooking School Magazine, and the book belongs to a small genre aimed at newly married couples and small city households at a time when the family table was the usual assumption. That accounts for the odd scale here: a pie built on a single plate with five or six apples, and pastry recipes divided in halves and thirds. The distinction the book draws between "apple pie" and "English apple pie" is the old one between the American double-crusted pie baked in a shallow plate and the English deep dish with only a lid, closer to what most English cooks would simply have called a baked apple pudding or pie. The insistence on agate ware reflects a change in equipment: enamelled steel was making its way into American kitchens alongside tin and pottery, and the choice of material mattered far more before ovens had thermostats.