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Apple Turnovers
Make simple pastry and roll out rather thin, cutting in squares. In the centre of each place apple sauce, then fold over by opposite corners, forming a triangle; pinch together; slash, or prick and bake quickly.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make pastry and have a jar of apple sauce on hand. The only real variables are the thickness of the filling and the heat of the oven.
- Bake quickly"Quickly" in period usage points to a hot oven; the book gives no figure, but the usual modern equivalent is around 425-450F. Turnovers want that heat so the pastry sets and puffs before the filling can soak through the bottom; roughly 20-25 minutes for a 4-inch turnover.
- Simple pastryThis means plain short pastry - flour, fat, salt, ice water - rather than puff paste. Roll it about 1/8 inch and cut squares of 4 to 5 inches.
- The apple sauce must be thickThis is the hinge. Loose, wet sauce steams inside the pastry and splits it open. Cook the sauce down until a spoon drawn through it leaves a track, and let it cool completely before filling; a tablespoon or so per square is plenty.
- SealingPinching alone tends to give way in a hot oven. Brush the edges with water, fold, press with the back of a fork, and chill the assembled turnovers 15 minutes before baking.
- Slash or prickBoth work, and one of them is not optional - the steam needs somewhere to go. Two short cuts through the top layer only.
- FinishingThe recipe gives none. A wash of milk or beaten egg and a scatter of sugar before baking is period-appropriate and gives colour.
- YieldA single-crust batch of pastry, about 1 1/2 cups flour, gives roughly half a dozen turnovers of this size. They are best warm, an hour or so out of the oven.
Turnovers are one of the oldest ways of eating pastry - filling folded into dough and baked or fried, portable and needing no dish - and the apple version is generally traced to the English fruit pasty tradition said to have come to America with the early colonists. Books of this sort group them under "The Apple" because the apple was the year-round American fruit: barrelled in the cellar, dried in strings, boiled down to sauce and apple butter, and drawn on all winter when nothing fresh was to be had. A recipe this brief is a sign that the writer expected the reader to have apple sauce already made, and to be looking only for a new way to use it up.