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Apple Pie
1 1/2 cups flour 1 1/2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons shortening 4 apples, or 1 quart sliced apples 2 tablespoons sugar cold water Sift flour, baking powder and salt; add shortening and rub in very lightly; add just enough cold water to hold dough together. Roll half out on floured board, line bottom of pie plate; fill in apples, which have been washed, pared and cut into thin slices; sprinkle with sugar; flavor with cinnamon or nutmeg; wet edges of crust with cold water; roll out remainder of pastry; cover pie, pressing edges tightly together and bake in moderate oven 30 minutes.
A lean, baking-powder-raised pastry from a Royal Baking Powder promotional book — closer to a biscuit crust than the flaky all-butter kind, and it behaves differently. A few adjustments make the difference between a good pie and a pale one.
- The oven"Moderate" in books of this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 350-375F, though period sources vary. At that heat and only 30 minutes, expect a soft, blond crust and apples that are barely tender. A common modern approach is to start a fruit pie at 425F for 15 minutes to set and colour the bottom, then drop to 375F and continue until the filling bubbles through the vents — often 45 to 55 minutes total.
- Very little shorteningTwo tablespoons of fat to 1 1/2 cups of flour is unusually lean; standard pastry runs three to four times that. With so little fat there is no flaking; the baking powder lifts the dough instead, giving a tender, slightly cakey crust. Given the book's purpose, this looks like the product being written in rather than a technical necessity.
- Cold water, added sparinglyWith so little fat, the dough hydrates fast and turns tough if worked. Add water a tablespoon at a time until the mass just coheres, then stop. Roll it once, thin, and get it into the plate.
- How much sugarTwo tablespoons is very little by current taste, and it assumes fairly sweet cooking apples. With Granny Smith or another tart variety, 1/2 to 2/3 cup is more usual. Add a tablespoon of flour or cornstarch as well if the apples are juicy — the recipe has no thickener at all.
- A quart of sliced applesThe recipe treats four apples and a quart of slices as equivalent, so measure by volume: a quart of thin slices is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb prepared, or two to three large modern apples. Slice no thicker than 1/4 inch, since the short bake gives them little time to soften.
- Cut ventsThe instruction to press the edges tightly together and nothing else will trap steam. Slash the top crust in three or four places before it goes in, or the lid lifts off the fruit and the seal blows out at the rim.
- Pan and yieldThis quantity of pastry is modest for a double crust; it will stretch to a 9-inch plate if rolled thin, and sits more comfortably in an 8-inch. Six modest slices. Let the pie stand at least half an hour before cutting so the juices settle.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a genre that shaped American home baking as much as any general cookbook: the free or near-free pamphlet issued by a manufacturer, with its product written into nearly every page. Royal Baking Powder, a cream-of-tartar powder marketed heavily from the later nineteenth century onward, published a long series of these, and their recipes consistently reach for baking powder in places a neutral cookbook would not — including, as here, a pie crust. The result is a hybrid: a thin, quick, low-fat pastry that is easy for an inexperienced cook to handle, at the cost of the flakiness a rich short crust delivers. It reflects a real domestic economy too, in which shortening was watched carefully and a pie was assembled from what the household already had. Double-crust apple pie itself long predates all of this, its arrival in America generally traced to English settlers, but the version recorded here is unmistakably a product of the branded-pamphlet era.