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Apple Sauce Pie
Beat the yolks of 2 eggs with 1/2 cup sugar until light. Then beat in 2 cups strained sweetened apple sauce. Flavour with wintergreen, and bake in one crust.
Whip the whites of the eggs to a stiff snow. Add 2 tablespoons powdered sugar, spread over the pie. Brown lightly in oven.
A thrifty custard pie built on a jar of apple sauce, from an era when the pantry held a bottle of wintergreen essence alongside the vanilla. Two things need attention: the flavouring and the meringue.
- Wintergreen means extract, not oilUse a few drops of wintergreen extract or essence, the kind sold for baking and candy. Undiluted oil of wintergreen is concentrated methyl salicylate and is not a kitchen ingredient at any measure; it should never go into food. If the flavour does not appeal, vanilla or a scrape of nutmeg suits the filling perfectly well.
- "Bake in one crust"A single-crust pie: line the plate with pastry, leave it unbaked, and pour the filling in.
- OvenStart at 425F for about 10 minutes to set the pastry rim, then drop to 350F and bake 25 to 30 minutes, until the centre barely trembles. A custard baked hot throughout will curdle and weep.
- The apple sauce"Strained sweetened apple sauce" means smooth and already sugared, roughly the texture of commercial unsweetened sauce with sugar beaten in. Chunky sauce gives a coarse, uneven filling rather than a smooth custard; press it through a sieve or blitz it first. If your sauce is already sweet, cut the half cup of sugar back to a third.
- Meringue proportionsTwo tablespoons of powdered sugar for two whites is lean by current practice and tends to bead and weep. Two tablespoons of sugar per white gives a stabler foam; beat to stiff, glossy peaks and add the sugar gradually once the whites are frothy.
- Sealing the meringueSpread it right out to touch the pastry edge all round. Meringue that stops short of the crust shrinks back and slides as it cools.
- Browning"Brown lightly" is 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, or 425F for 4 to 5 if the pie is still warm. Cool away from a draught and serve the same day; the filling loosens overnight.
- YieldOne pie, six to eight slices.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to sell its Five Roses flour, and like most milling-company books it leans hard on pastry, bread and cake, where the brand had something to prove. Apple sauce pie belongs to a long line of North American "one crust" pies that stretch a small amount of fruit with eggs and sugar into a full dessert, the same logic behind vinegar pie and buttermilk pie. Wintergreen as a dessert flavouring now reads as odd, but essence of wintergreen was a familiar shelf item in Canadian and northern American kitchens well into the twentieth century, distilled originally from the leaves of Gaultheria procumbens and later made synthetically; it flavoured candy, chewing gum and soft drinks.