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Apple Pie with Pineapple
Bake an apple pie in the usual way, but without sweetening. While it is baking take three tablespoons of grated pineapple, one tablespoon of water, three of sugar, and simmer together till the fruit looks clear. When the pie is taken from the oven, remove the top crust, spread the pineapple over the apple, replace the cover and set the pie away to cool. The pineapple mixture furnishes the sweetening.
A double-crust apple pie with no sugar in the filling; all the sweetening is a small pineapple syrup slipped under the lid after baking. The whole thing hinges on getting the top crust off in one piece.
- Lifting the lidRun a thin knife around the rim as soon as the pie leaves the oven, while the crust is still flexible, and lift the top off with a wide spatula in a single piece. If it cracks, it goes back on as a mosaic and nobody minds much, but a slotted or vented lid comes away more cleanly than a solid one.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; "the usual way" left it to the cook. A workable modern equivalent is a hot start of about 425F for 15 minutes to set the pastry, then 350F for a further 35 to 45 minutes, until the apples are tender to a skewer through the vent.
- Grated pineappleThis meant fresh pineapple grated on a coarse box grater; canned pineapple was widely sold by this period, though how often it came ready-grated in the tin is less clear. Canned crushed pineapple, well drained, is the nearest modern equivalent; three tablespoons is a little under a quarter cup.
- The sweetening is very lightThree tablespoons of sugar for a whole pie is barely sweet by current standards, and the syrup sits in one thin layer rather than through the fruit. If you want a conventionally sweet pie, scale the pineapple mixture up two or three times, keeping the one-to-one proportion of pineapple to sugar and a splash of water.
- Choose the apples for itWith no sugar in the filling, a sharp cooking apple such as Bramley or Granny Smith will read as sour. Something more balanced, like Golden Delicious, Braeburn or Jonagold, suits an unsweetened filling better.
- Simmer until clearThe visual cue is reliable: the shreds turn translucent and the liquid thickens to a syrup in roughly five minutes over low heat. Stop there, as it tightens further off the heat and will turn to candy if reduced too far.
- Cooling matters"Set the pie away to cool" is instruction, not housekeeping. The pineapple syrup needs time to soak down into the apple; served warm it simply runs out of the cut. Allow two hours at room temperature.
- YieldOne pie, six to eight servings; the recipe does not state a size.
Pineapple turns up often in American recipe books of the 1880s and 1890s, and the reason is largely industrial: canned pineapple, first from the West Indies and later from Hawaii, moved from a luxury towards a pantry staple within a generation. Cooks who could not get a fresh pineapple in February could get a can, and books of this period contain many small experiments using it as a flavouring rather than as a fruit in its own right. This recipe belongs to that impulse. The trick of baking a pie, lifting the lid and slipping something underneath is older than the pineapple, and turns up elsewhere for adding cream, custard or a jam layer to a pie that went into the oven plain.