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Apple Pie (Line the plate with the crust)
Line the plate with the crust. On the bottom scatter a quarter of a cup of sugar mixed with a tablespoon of flour, laying apples carefully up to the desired thickness. Sprinkle sugar on the top and put in small pieces of butter. Place in the cooker, using both radiators, for about forty-five minutes.
Any fruit pies can be baked in this manner.
This is a conventional apple pie routed through a fireless cooker, the insulated box that was standard equipment in many households around 1900. Most of the translation work is in the equipment, not the filling.
- What the cooker and radiators wereA fireless cooker was an insulated box with recessed wells; the "radiators" were soapstone or cast-iron discs heated red-hot on the range and set above and below the food to bake by stored heat. Using both means one under the pie plate and one over it, giving heat from two sides.
- In a modern ovenBake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the bottom crust, then 350F for 35 to 45 minutes until the juices bubble thickly at the vent. The 45 minutes in the original is the cooker's total falling-heat time, not an oven time.
- BrowningA fireless cooker gives soft, still heat with no dry air movement, and colour on top was the method's weak point; even with a well-heated upper radiator expect a paler crust than an oven gives. In an oven, an egg-wash or milk-and-sugar glaze covers it.
- The quantitiesA quarter cup of sugar and a tablespoon of flour is the whole thickener and sweetener. The recipe gives no plate size, so the figures here assume a 9-inch plate; on that basis it is restrained by current standards. With tart apples you may want a third to a half cup of sugar and two tablespoons of flour, particularly if the fruit is juicy.
- "Up to the desired thickness"Reckon on 6 to 7 cups of peeled, sliced apples, mounded slightly, for a 9-inch plate. A firm cooking apple that holds its shape is what this method wants, since there is no fierce heat to drive off excess liquid.
- ButterAbout a tablespoon, dotted over the top, is right. Nothing in the text specifies an upper crust; the recipe as written is an open pie, though the same filling takes a lid or lattice.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings.
Fireless cookery had a serious vogue in American households from roughly 1900 into the 1920s, promoted as a fuel-saving and labour-saving method: food was brought to temperature on the range, then sealed into a hay-, felt- or mineral-wool-lined box to finish on retained heat while the cook did something else. Baking was the hardest thing to ask of it, which is why heated soapstone radiators were sold as accessories, and why books on the subject devote whole sections to showing that pies, breads and roasts could be managed at all. The final sentence here, offering the method for any fruit pie, is the tell: this is less a recipe for apple pie than a demonstration that the cooker can be trusted with pastry. The technique belongs to the same family as the haybox and the modern insulated thermal cooker, and the underlying appeal was the same then as now, cooking without tending a fire through a hot afternoon.