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Sliced Apple Pie
(1st Prize at County Fair, Picton, Ont.) First, have pie apples, say Wealthies, Greenings Duchess, Red Astrachan. Line pan with light rich pastry and fill up with apples sliced thin and lengthwise. Sweeten to taste with granulated sugar. Add piece of butter size of butternut and sprinkle with a little cinnamon. When the top crust is put on, wet edges and rub together. Have a strip of cotton 1 inch in width, wet and draw around the edge.
Remove this strip when pie is done.
Note on Apple Pies-A soda biscuit rolled fine and put in an apple pie will keep the juice from boiling over and prevent the oven from getting sticky and disagreeable. Bread dust could likewise be used.
A prize-winning county-fair pie written for cooks who already knew how to build one. Everything unstated — oven, quantities, timing — has to be supplied, and two of the instructions describe kitchen equipment that no longer exists.
- The cotton strip is the hingeA one-inch band of wet cotton drawn around the crimped rim would have kept the sealed edge damp and shielded it from scorching before the filling cooked through; the recipe says only to remove it when the pie is done. A dampened strip of cotton muslin still works; so does a modern pie shield or a collar of foil.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or time is given; ovens of the period were wood or coal ranges judged by hand. As a modern starting point, 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then 350F for another 40 to 45 minutes, until juice bubbles thickly through the vents.
- Butter the size of a butternutA butternut is the white walnut, Juglans cinerea, once common in Ontario hedgerows and roughly walnut-sized. Read it as about 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons, dotted over the apples.
- Soda biscuitHere this most likely means a plain soda cracker rather than a baking-soda scone; "rolled fine" and the alternative of bread dust both point to something dry and crisp. One or two crushed fine absorb juice and keep it from boiling over — the same job cornstarch or tapioca does now.
- The applesWealthy, Rhode Island Greening, Duchess of Oldenburg and Red Astrachan are all tart cooking varieties; Greening is a late keeper that holds its shape, while Duchess and Red Astrachan are early summer apples that soften quickly. Northern Spy, Bramley, Granny Smith or a mix of Cortland and Golden Delicious stand in. Avoid a soft eating apple that collapses.
- Sweeten to tasteFor a 9-inch pie of tart apples, 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar with about 6 to 7 cups of sliced fruit is the usual range; sweeter varieties want closer to half a cup. Add the cinnamon by the half-teaspoon.
- Sliced lengthwiseProbably cut from stem to blossom end rather than across the core, giving long slices that pack down flat and leave fewer air pockets under the top crust.
- YieldOne 9-inch double-crust pie, six to eight servings. Cool at least two hours before cutting or the filling runs.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and like most milling-company books of the era it was built largely from recipes sent in by the women who used it — hence the attribution here to a first prize at the county fair in Picton, Ontario. Picton sits in Prince Edward County, on Lake Ontario, which by the early twentieth century was serious apple and canning country. The cotton strip around the rim belongs to a kitchen without adjustable ovens, where the edge of a pie was the first thing to burn, and the cracker-crumb note at the end speaks to the reality of cleaning a wood range after a boil-over.