Apple Pie
Peel and slice tart apples and place in stewpan with barely enough water to keep from burning. Stew till but half tender (and unbroken); fill a pastry-lined dish or pan, which has sugar and butter sprinkled and dotted over the bottom, with layers of the apple, alternating with the sugar and butter till dish is full. On top sprinkle flour and nutmeg or cinnamon or grated lemon peel and pour over the whole three-fourths cup of the apple-syrup or water and sugar. Place a pastry cover over the top and slash well. The pastry lining should be baked till a light brown before the apples are added. For the paste see Introductory Recipes.
A two-stage apple pie: the bottom crust is blind-baked and the apples are pre-stewed, which sidesteps the usual raw-apple problems of a soggy base and a hollow dome. A few of the instructions need translating.
- The hinge: stew only to half tenderThe apples must still hold their shape when they go into the shell, or they collapse into sauce in the oven. Six to eight minutes over low heat with a couple of tablespoons of water is usually enough for firm slices; stir as little as possible.
- Blind-baking the bottom"Baked till a light brown" means line the pan, prick or weight the base, and bake at 400F for about 15-20 minutes. Let it cool a little before filling so the butter in the pastry sets.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. Start the assembled pie at 425F for 15 minutes to set and colour the top crust, then drop to 375F for 25-30 minutes until the syrup bubbles through the slashes.
- QuantitiesAlso unstated, as in many recipes of this kind. For a 9-inch pie figure on about 2 1/2 lb tart apples before peeling, 3/4 to 1 cup sugar depending on the fruit, and 2-3 tablespoons butter dotted through the layers.
- "Tart apples"A firm cooking apple that keeps its edges rather than a sweet eating apple. Northern Spy and Rhode Island Greening are period American varieties; Granny Smith or Bramley serve as modern equivalents. Sweet modern eating apples give a flatter, mushier pie.
- The flour on topSprinkling flour over the fruit rather than tossing it through is a period method of thickening; it works, but the flour can stay pale and pasty in streaks. Tossing 2 tablespoons of flour with the sugar before layering gives a cleaner set.
- The apple-syrupThe liquid left in the stewpan. Three-quarters of a cup is generous for a pre-cooked filling in a blind-baked shell; a scant half cup gives less risk of a flooded base.
- Slash wellTake this seriously. Pre-stewed fruit plus that much syrup makes a lot of steam, and an unvented top crust lifts off the filling and cracks.
- YieldOne 9-inch double-crust pie, six to eight servings. Best eaten the day it is baked, while the bottom crust is still crisp.
Apple pie was so thoroughly domestic in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America that some cookbooks could assume the reader had made one many times and needed only the author's particular refinements. Here the refinements are the pre-stewing and the blind-baked bottom, both aimed at two familiar faults: a raw, sodden under-crust, and a filling that shrinks away and leaves the top crust arched over empty space. The recipe's cross-reference to "Introductory Recipes" for the pastry suggests a standing paste used across the whole book rather than repeated at each pie. The nutmeg, cinnamon and grated lemon peel offered as alternatives are the long-standing English seasonings for cooked apple, which appear to have carried into American practice with little change.