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Dried Apple Pie
1 cup stewed apples 1 cup milk 1 cup sugar 1 egg and yolk of another Nutmeg Cover with meringue made of the white of the egg, after the above has been baked in under crust.
This is a custard pie rather than a fruit pie: the stewed apples are stretched with milk, sugar and egg into a soft set filling, then topped with meringue. The instructions assume you already know how to handle a custard, so a few numbers are worth filling in.
- Dried apples firstThe recipe begins with "stewed apples" and takes for granted that you started from dried ones. Cover about 1 cup of dried apple slices with water, soak an hour or more, then simmer until soft and mash or sieve them; you want a thick, smooth cup of pulp, not chunks, or the custard will not set evenly around them.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Modern practice with custard pies is to start hot and finish moderate: if you choose to blind-bake the shell, 425F until set and lightly coloured, then 325-350F for the filling. Note the original simply bakes the filling in the raw under crust. Much hotter and the egg tightens and the custard weeps.
- The hinge: judge by the centre, not the clockPull the pie when the outer inch is set and the middle still trembles; it finishes on the counter. A custard baked until the centre is firm will crack and leak liquid under the meringue.
- "Under crust"This means a single bottom crust only, with no top pastry and no lattice. The meringue is the lid.
- Egg countOne whole egg plus one extra yolk for a cup of milk is a soft set by modern standards. The reserved white makes the meringue, so you need two eggs in total and will have one spare white.
- SugarA full cup of sugar with sweet stewed apples is very sweet to current taste. Two-thirds of a cup in the custard, with a couple of tablespoons held back for the meringue, reads closer to a modern pie.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the filling before baking; the difference in a plain custard is obvious.
- MeringueBeat the reserved white to soft peaks with about 2 tablespoons sugar, spread it so it touches the crust rim all round to stop shrinkage, and colour it at 350F for 12-15 minutes. Spreading meringue onto a still-warm filling helps it seal.
- YieldThe quantities suit one 8-inch pie, cutting into six modest slices. Refrigerate leftovers; this is an egg-and-milk pie and does not keep on the counter.
Dried apple pie is a winter pie, and its presence in a Canadian flour-company cookbook is a reminder of how households ate fruit out of season before home canning became routine. Apples were peeled, cored, sliced and strung or spread on racks to dry in late summer, then stored in sacks and reconstituted through the cold months. Because dried apple pulp is concentrated and a little coarse, a custard of milk, sugar and egg would have extended it and softened the leathery texture that plain rehydrated fruit can keep. The Five Roses Cook Book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and said to have been distributed with sacks of its flour, was assembled largely from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, which accounts for the telegraphic style here: a list of proportions for a dish the contributor assumed every reader had already made.