Serve
Use a large, rather shallow earthen baking dish. Pare, core and slice sufficient tart apples to fill it. Measure before filling the dish and for 2 quarts of sliced apples add 1 scant cupful of sugar, 1/2 nutmeg grated, 2/3 of a cupful of cold water, and 1 tablespoonful of butter cut into bits.
Over this place an upper crust of plain pastry, rolling it rather thick. Bake in a slow oven for two hours and a half. Transfer to the warming oven, or any part of the stove where it will keep very hot without baking, cover closely and let stand for one hour more. Serve warm with cream and sugar. When properly baked the apples will be rich and red all through.
A deep-dish apple pie with a top crust only, baked long and slow. The unusual part is the schedule: nearly four hours between oven and warming shelf, which is what produces the deep red fruit promised at the end.
- The hinge is the slow ovenA slow oven is usually reckoned somewhere between 275F and 325F. The two and a half hours are not a misprint; at that low temperature the fruit and sugar cook down gradually rather than boiling, which is generally what is credited with turning the apples dark amber-red rather than pale and mushy. Raising the heat to shorten the time defeats the whole recipe.
- The hour of standingThe warming oven or cooler end of a coal range corresponds to a modern oven turned off, or held at its lowest setting around 170F. Covered closely, the pie continues to soften and the juices thicken. Skipping this step gives a looser, paler filling.
- How many applesTwo quarts of sliced apples is roughly 2 to 2.5 lb of prepared fruit; the recipe is explicit that you measure after slicing, so allow rather more whole apples than that, perhaps seven or eight medium ones. Use a genuinely tart cooking apple that holds its shape, since anything mild will vanish into sauce over that long a bake.
- The dishA large shallow earthen baking dish means glazed stoneware or ceramic, something on the order of a 9-by-13 pan two inches deep. Metal works but conducts faster; ceramic or glass suits the long gentle bake better.
- NutmegHalf a nutmeg grated is about 1 to 1.5 teaspoons, considerably more than most modern recipes use. Grate it fresh, and reduce it if you are used to the pre-ground kind.
- No bottom crustOnly an upper crust is called for, rolled thick so it does not disintegrate into the fruit over two and a half hours. Cut a few vents; a thick lid on a wet filling with nowhere to steam will lift and crack.
- ServingEnough to fill a large shallow dish; the recipe gives no yield, but two quarts of apples will serve six to eight. Cream here means plain unwhipped cream poured over, with sugar passed separately.
This is the plain deep-dish apple pie, first cousin to the pandowdy and the apple slump, and it belongs to a thrift tradition rather than a pastry one: a single top crust uses half the flour, butter and lard of a two-crust pie, and the filling stretches a few pounds of apples a long way. The long slow bake is a legacy of the wood or coal range, where a fire banked down after the bread came out gave hours of gentle declining heat and a warming shelf that cost nothing to use. The red color the recipe promises is often said to be the result of that patience, as the apple sugars and the added sugar caramelise without ever coming to a hard boil. The thrift is the point: the expensive part of a pie was always the crust, and the cheapest way to eat pie was to have less of it.