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New England Apple Cream Pie
1 cup diced apples 1 cup water 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1/2 teaspoon grated lemon rind 1 cup cream 2 tablespoons powdered sugar Pastry Cook the apples with the lemon rind in the water until quite dry. Add the sugar, lemon juice and the cream. Turn into a pastry crust and bake until set. Make a meringue of whipped cream, vegetable gelatine and the powdered sugar, and cover the pie with this.
Tart apples are best used for this pie.
A shallow single-crust pie with no eggs in it: the filling sets by reduction and the richness of the cream alone, which makes the two vaguest instructions here — "quite dry" and "until set" — the ones that decide whether it works.
- Cook the apples truly dryThe cup of water is only a cooking medium for softening the apples and steeping the lemon rind. Simmer uncovered until the pan is nearly free of liquid, otherwise the cream filling will never firm up and the crust will go to paste.
- The nutmeg is orphanedNutmeg appears in the ingredient list but never in the method. Add it with the sugar and lemon juice, off the heat, so it does not turn dusty and bitter.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A pie shell with a soft, eggless cream filling wants about 375F for 30 to 40 minutes — set at the edges with a slight tremble at the centre. It will firm further as it cools.
- Blind-bake the shellA wet filling in a raw crust for this short a bake gives a slack bottom. Bake the pastry at 400F with weights until dry and pale gold, then fill.
- "Vegetable gelatine" is agar"Vegetable gelatine" is almost certainly agar -- the term was used for seaweed-derived setting agents, most often agar-agar, though it was sometimes applied to carrageen (Irish moss) as well. Unlike animal gelatine, agar must be simmered in liquid to dissolve -- soaking in cold water will do nothing -- and it sets firm at room temperature. No quantity is given here; a very small amount, a quarter teaspoon of agar powder softened and boiled in a couple of tablespoons of water, is the order of magnitude, but the original is genuinely silent on this.
- It is not a meringueThe topping contains no egg white. It is sweetened whipped cream stabilised with agar, and it should be piled on the cooled pie, not returned to the oven. Fold the dissolved agar in while it is still warm and liquid, working quickly, or it will set in threads.
- Apple choiceThe note about tart apples is doing real work. A firm, acid apple holds its dice through the reduction and balances a filling that is otherwise sugar and cream; a sweet, mealy variety collapses into sauce.
- YieldNo size is given. The quantities suit one shallow 8-inch pie, perhaps six slices; they would be thin in a 9-inch shell. Serve the day it is made -- the crust softens overnight under a cream filling.
Cream pies of this kind belong to a New England pattern in which a single crust is filled with fruit, sugar and dairy and baked just long enough to set, no eggs and no top crust required — the sort of pie made when apples were in the cellar and cream was on hand. What marks this version as belonging to a meatless cookbook is the topping: ordinary gelatine is rendered from animal bones and hides, so vegetarian and reform cooks turned instead to "vegetable gelatine," the seaweed extract sold then and now as agar-agar. Its use to stiffen whipped cream in imitation of meringue is a small illustration of how much of early meatless cookery was substitution work rather than new invention — finding a plant-derived stand-in for each animal product and carrying on with the familiar dish.