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Apple Pie (Pare core and slice tart juicy)
Pare, core and slice tart, juicy apples; cook them in as little water as possible; rub through a colander; add a piece of butter the size of an egg and sugar to taste; also half the peel of a grated lemon. Bake between two crusts, using half puff-paste or plain paste.
A strained-apple pie rather than a sliced one: the fruit is cooked down and pushed through a colander first, which gives a smooth, almost buttery filling closer to apple butter than to a lattice-topped country pie. Two details in the original need translating before you start.
- Butter the size of an eggA common nineteenth-century approximation for a lump of butter: usually read as about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. It is stirred into the hot puree, where it also helps the filling firm up as it cools.
- "As little water as possible"Two or three tablespoons in a heavy covered pan is enough to keep the fruit from catching before it releases its own juice. Excess water is the main cause of a slack filling and a soaked bottom crust.
- Choose the apple for acid, not sweetness"Tart, juicy" means a cooking apple that collapses: Bramley, Granny Smith, Rhode Island Greening, Northern Spy. Sweeter dessert apples give a flat, cloying purée once sugar is added.
- The colander does the work of a food millRubbing the cooked fruit through catches fibre and any stray bit of core. A food mill or a coarse sieve is faster and gives the same result; a blender does not, as it aerates the puree and thins it.
- Cool the filling firstThe recipe does not say so, but hot purée poured into raw pastry melts the fat and produces a grey, sodden base. Let it come to room temperature.
- Sugar to tasteStart at about 1/2 cup for 2 pounds of prepared apples and adjust while the purée is still warm. The grated half-lemon peel is there to keep it from tasting one-note; the juice is not called for but a spoonful does no harm.
- Oven and timingNeither is given. A pie of this kind is baked hot to set the pastry, around 425F for the first 15 minutes, then 350F for another 25 to 30 until the top crust is properly coloured. The filling is already cooked, so you are baking pastry only.
- Half puff-pasteAn older intermediate pastry, richer than shortcrust and less laminated than full puff. A bought all-butter puff sheet for the lid with a plain shortcrust base is the practical modern equivalent.
- YieldAbout 2 pounds of apples fills a 9-inch pie, serving six to eight.
The strained filling belongs to an older English tradition of apple pies made from pulp rather than slices, closely related to apple butter and to the apple "marmalade" of eighteenth-century cookery, where fruit was reduced first and enriched with butter and citrus peel. Grated lemon peel was a common perfume for apples in Anglo-American baking, though cinnamon and nutmeg also appear with apples in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century recipes. The instruction to use "half puff-paste or plain paste" offers the baker a choice between a richer pastry and a plainer one.