Apple Pie
5 or 6 apples 1/2 cup sugar 1 teaspoon butter Few gratings of nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon Once the rule for plain paste Divide the paste, line the plate, prepare the top sheet. Pare and core and cut the apples into eighths, pile into pie tin as high above the edge as the bottom of the plate is below. Add sugar and spices mixed together, dot with butter, brush the rim of paste with cold water; lay the top paste over and press edges together firmly. Bake forty to forty-five minutes in moderate oven.
A bare-bones two-crust apple pie from the era when pastry proportions were assumed knowledge. The instructions are sound; only the vocabulary needs translating.
- "Once the rule for plain paste"This means one full batch of the book's plain pastry recipe, enough for a double crust. Any standard double-crust pastry substitutes directly.
- "Pie plate" and "pie tin"Period pie plates were generally shallower than a modern deep-dish pan. Use a standard pie plate rather than a deep one, or the filling will not mound as described.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375°F. Some modern recipes start a pie hotter and then drop the heat to set the bottom crust; the original single moderate temperature works, but gives a paler base.
- The mounding instructionThis is the hinge of the recipe. Apples shrink appreciably as they cook, so piling them as far above the rim as the plate is deep is what keeps the baked pie from collapsing into a hollow dome. Do not level the filling.
- ApplesFive or six will come to roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb, or about 6 cups sliced, depending on size. The book assumes a firm, tart cooking apple -- Baldwin, Greening or Northern Spy then; Granny Smith or Braeburn now. Sweet eating apples may need less than the 1/2 cup sugar and are likelier to break down.
- No thickenerThere is no flour or cornstarch here, which is authentic to the period and gives a loose, juicy pie. If you want a filling that holds a cut slice, add a tablespoon of flour to the sugar and spice.
- Sealing and ventingWater on the rim is the only glue specified; press firmly with a fork or crimp by hand. Cut two or three vents in the top sheet — the original omits this, but an unvented crust will lift or split.
- Doneness and yieldForty-five minutes is right when the juices bubble thickly through the vents and a knife meets no resistance at the center. Serves 6 to 8, and cuts far more cleanly after two hours' cooling.
Gold Medal was the flour brand of the Washburn-Crosby company of Minneapolis, the firm that later became General Mills, and its cook books were promotional literature built around the flour itself -- hence a pastry chapter that treats "the rule for plain paste" as something the reader already has in hand. The terseness is characteristic of such books, which assumed a reader who already knew the proportions and needed only a reminder of order and timing. Apple pie was by then thoroughly domesticated in American cooking, though the dish descends from English apple tarts and "coffins" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which the pastry often served as a container rather than as something to be eaten. What marks this version as early twentieth-century American is the thin, short, edible crust and the plain treatment of the fruit -- no rosewater, no dried currants, no cider, just sugar, butter, cinnamon and a grating of nutmeg.