Apple Pie
4 to 6 tart apples 1/4 cup water 1 egg-yolk 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon nutmeg Powdered sugar Line a pie-pan with plain crust and fill with thinly sliced apples. Add the water and cover with a top crust, making it a little richer than the under one. This is easily done by rolling in bits of fat and folding the paste several times. Cut a few slits in the center of the top crust to allow steam to escape while cooking. Brush with beaten yolk of egg. When baked, and while still hot, remove the top crust carefully sprinkle sugar over the cooked apple and dot with butter or butter substitute. Replace the top crust and dust with powdered sugar. This is an old-fashioned method. Ingredients given make one pie.
A deep-dish apple pie whose trick is that the sugar and butter go in after baking, not before. That single step is the whole point of the recipe and the reason the fruit keeps its shape and tartness.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A two-crust fruit pie of this kind is baked hot to set the pastry, around 425F for the first 15 minutes, then reduced to about 350F for a further 35 to 45 minutes until the apples yield to a skewer through a slit.
- Lifting the lidCut the top crust free around the rim with a thin knife before you try to lift it, and slide a wide spatula or a tart-pan base underneath. Working while the pie is very hot keeps the pastry flexible; once cool it will crack.
- The nutmegThe ingredient list includes a teaspoon of nutmeg but the method never says when to add it; the likeliest reading is that it goes into the sugar sprinkled over the hot fruit. A whole teaspoon is assertive by current tastes; half is plenty for most palates.
- Apples"Tart" here means a firm cooking apple that holds a slice - Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy, Bramley. Four to six medium apples come to something like a pound and a half whole, less once peeled and cored; the recipe does not specify a pan size.
- Why so little liquidA quarter cup of water is all that is needed because unsweetened apples release their own juice. Sugaring the fruit before baking, as many later recipes do, draws out more liquid and gives a softer, wetter filling.
- Butter substituteThe phrase is common in earlier-twentieth-century American cookbooks, where margarine and shortening are offered in place of butter. Butter is what the dish wants; a tablespoon dotted over hot fruit melts into the juice as a glaze.
- Enriching the top crustRolling in bits of fat and folding is a rough rough-puff method. Keep the fat cold and the folds few - three is enough - or the crust will be tough rather than flaky.
- YieldOne pie; the recipe gives no pan size or serving count. Dust with powdered sugar just before it goes to the table, as it dissolves on a warm crust within minutes.
Adding the sugar after baking, as this recipe does, is an older habit than the sweetened-filling pies that dominate twentieth-century American cookbooks, and the writer says as much: "This is an old-fashioned method." It survives in English practice too, where the lid of a deep apple pie is sometimes lifted to slip in sugar, butter or a spoonful of cream before serving. The reasoning is practical rather than nostalgic - sugar draws juice from raw fruit, so keeping it out until the end leaves the slices intact and the crust dry underneath.