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Plain Apple Pie
3 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup lard (or lard and butter mixed) 1 teaspoon cream of tartar ½ teaspoon soda Pinch of salt Sliced apples ½ cup sugar 1 nutmeg (grated) Cinnamon to taste Sift the flour, soda, cream of tartar and soda together. Rub the shortening in the flour, and use enough water to make it all stick together. Knead very little, roll thin, spread on plate. Fill plate nearly full with apples sliced very thin and placed in smoothly. Spread half a cup of sugar over the apples, about a quarter of a nutmeg grated and cinnamon to taste.
Dampen the edge all around about half an inch wide. Roll out top paste and lay it on. around the edges with a pie-jigger or fork to press the pastes together and keep the juice from boiling over.
Bake in quick oven about 20 minutes, or until the apples are done.
Slit the top.
A contributed-style recipe from a Canadian flour-mill cookbook, written for a cook who already knows what pastry should feel like. Two things need fixing: the baking time and the missing thickener.
- The 20 minutes is wrongRaw thin-sliced apples in a double crust need 45 to 55 minutes. Start at 425F for the first 20 minutes to set and brown the pastry, then drop to 350F until the juices bubble thickly through the slit and a knife meets no resistance in the fruit.
- Quick oven425-450F.
- The ingredient list has a slipThe method has a slip -- The instruction says to sift "the flour, soda, cream of tartar and soda" — soda appears twice, though the ingredient list names it once. Use the amounts as listed: 1 teaspoon cream of tartar and 1/2 teaspoon soda, which together act as a single dose of homemade baking powder.
- Leavened pastryCream of tartar and soda turn up in pie dough in period North American recipes, and give a slightly puffed, biscuit-like crust rather than a flaky laminated one. Handle it as directed — knead very little — or the crust turns tough.
- Shortening1 cup lard to 3 cups flour is a rich crust by modern standards. Leaf lard or a half-and-half lard and butter mix both work; add the water a tablespoon at a time, since flour today absorbs differently than the original patent flour.
- No flour or cornstarch in the fillingThis is why the recipe insists on sealing and crimping the edge so firmly. Tart, firm apples (Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Bramley) hold together; soft supermarket apples will flood the crust.
- A quarter nutmegGrated from a whole nutmeg, that is roughly 1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon — assertive. The ingredient list says one nutmeg, the method says a quarter of one; follow the method.
- Pie plate and yield"Spread on plate" gives no size; a 9-inch pie plate is a reasonable modern assumption, though the quantity of pastry may run to more than one crust's worth. Reckon 6 to 8 servings a pie, and set it on a baking sheet, since without thickener juice can escape.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, and it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by women who cooked with the brand — which is why the phrasing shifts from page to page. Five Roses was a hard-wheat Manitoba flour, strong and absorbent, and the books were as much an argument for Canadian prairie wheat as they were kitchen manuals. The pie itself is "plain" in the older sense: no thickener, no lemon, no butter dotted on the fruit, just apples, sugar and spice under a crust. Cream of tartar and soda worked into pastry dough is a good marker of the era.