Home › Desserts › Baked Apple Patties
Baked Apple Patties
Take from the bread dough, when ready to mold into loaves, as much as would make one small "brick" loaf. Into it work 1 egg, beaten with 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar, using a spoonful or so of flour if too sticky to handle, but only as much as is absolutely necessary. Roll out on the floured board until half an inch thick, then cut in circles with a large cup or cutter. Have ready some thick apple sauce which has been stewed with raisins-½ cupful to a pint until the latter are very tender. Wet the edges of a circle, in the center put I or more spoonfuls of the sauce, cover with a second circle and pinch the edges firmly together. Place an inch or more apart on greased pans, let stand until the dough begins to rise, then brush the top of each with a little beaten egg yolk and bake in a quick oven.
A frugal dessert built on borrowed bread dough — the sort of recipe that assumes you bake bread weekly. The key is to enrich and roll the dough without letting it get slack, and to use apple sauce thick enough that it does not soak through the seam.
- How much doughA "small brick loaf" is roughly 1 to 1¼ lb of risen dough. Any plain white bread dough works, including a store-bought pound of pizza or bread dough at a pinch.
- The raisin measure"1½ cupful to a pint" is ambiguous as written; it most likely means 1½ cups of raisins stewed into a pint of apple sauce. Either reading gives a very fruity filling, so adjust to taste.
- Filling consistencyThe sauce must be genuinely thick — spoonable, not pourable. Thin apple sauce steams inside the pastry, blows the seam open, and the patties leak onto the pan. Cook it down until a spoon dragged through leaves a clear track.
- Working in the eggAdding a beaten egg and sugar to already-risen dough makes it slack and sticky. Knead it in on a lightly floured board and resist adding much flour; a short rest of 10 minutes makes it far easier to roll.
- Quick oven425–450F. At that heat the patties take about 15–20 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and the bottoms sound hollow.
- The second rise"Let stand until the dough begins to rise" means about 20–30 minutes in a warm kitchen — the filled rounds should look puffed but not doubled. Overproofed patties collapse and split at the seam.
- SealingPress the wetted edges firmly with fingertips, then crimp with a fork. A cup used as a cutter gives rounds of about 3 inches; since each patty takes two rounds, a pound of dough rolled a half-inch thick will not go far — count on a modest batch.
- ServingBest warm the day they are baked. They stale quickly, as bread dough does, though they reheat well in a 350F oven for a few minutes.
This belongs to a large family of turnovers made from bread dough rather than pastry — a family resemblance often drawn between the fruit-filled buns and fried dough pockets of northern Europe and the American "apple pocket" or fried pie, though the line of descent is not documented. The economy is in the method: the baker was already making bread, and a piece of that dough, enriched with one egg and two spoonfuls of sugar, became dessert at almost no additional cost. Raisins stewed with the apples do the work of extra sugar, which mattered in a period when sweetening was a real line in the household budget. Recipes of this type are common in early twentieth-century low-cost cookery collections, whose readers are generally assumed to have baked their own bread as a matter of course and to have been encouraged to see leftovers and spare dough as raw material rather than remainder.