Apple Pie
Use either Puff or Plain Paste. For filling for a mediumsized pie tin, three cups pared and sliced apples, one half cup sugar, one eighth teaspoon salt, one tablespoon butter, one fourth teaspoon cinnamon, one tablespoon lemon juice, and grated rind of one half lemon.
Apple Pie No. 2 Use either Puff or Plain Paste. For filling use rule for Apple Sauce, and season to taste.
A bare-bones filling formula of the kind common in early twentieth-century books, where the pastry and the baking were assumed knowledge. A few gaps need filling before it works as written.
- No oven temperature is givenBake a double-crust apple pie at 425F for the first 15-20 minutes to set and brown the bottom crust, then reduce to 350F for another 35-45 minutes until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- Three cups is a light fillingThe book specifies only a 'medium-sized pie tin' and gives no diameter. A modern 9-inch pie plate wants 5 to 6 cups, so increase the sugar, butter, cinnamon and lemon in proportion.
- No thickenerThe rule relies on the apples themselves and on evaporation. With juicier modern varieties, a tablespoon of flour or two teaspoons of cornstarch tossed with the sugar prevents a flooded bottom crust; the older New England cooking apples such as Baldwin and Greening are generally said to have cooked down drier.
- Choice of applePick a firm, tart apple that holds its shape - Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Braeburn. The half cup of sugar assumes real acidity; with a sweet dessert apple the pie will taste flat, and the lemon juice will not be enough to save it.
- AssemblingMix the filling and mound it slightly in the lower crust, dot the butter over the top rather than stirring it in, and cut steam vents in the upper crust. Seal the edges well; the pie will bubble.
- Puff or Plain PasteBoth refer to separate recipes elsewhere in the book. Plain Paste is an ordinary short pastry and is the sensible choice for a fruit pie; puff paste tends to collapse under a wet filling.
- Apple Pie No. 2This substitutes cooked, sweetened applesauce for raw slices; the book does not say whether the pie is open or covered. Drain thick applesauce well or the crust will be sodden - it needs no further baking beyond setting the pastry, roughly 30 minutes at 400F.
- YieldOne medium pie, six modest slices. Best eaten the day it is baked, while the bottom crust is still crisp.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its chocolate specialties it carries a full general repertoire - hence a plain apple pie stated in three lines. The terseness is telling: a book of this kind could give a filling ratio and trust the reader to supply the pastry and the oven.