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Apple Pie-English
2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking 1 1/2 cup butter 1 cup milk 1/4 teaspoon salt 3 cups flour Sift flour, salt and baking powder thoroughly. Work in butter cold. Add milk, making dough as for Standard Biscuit (see recipe, page 9). Peel, core and quarter apples. Line stewpan with dough to within two inches of bottom; pour in 1/2 cups water, apples and sugar. Wet edges and cover with rest of dough. Place in moderate oven until apples are cooked. By placing stewpan on bottom of oven, the apples cook better. This can be flavored with lemon extract or spices, if desired.
A baking-powder-company recipe, printed in the compressed style those booklets used: ingredients in two columns, quantities for the apples and sugar left to the cook. It is a deep-dish apple pudding baked in a saucepan rather than a pie plate.
- The missing quantitiesThe ingredient column lists only the pastry; apples, sugar and the flavouring are unmeasured. For a 2- to 3-quart stewpan, reckon on 6 to 8 medium tart apples and 3/4 to 1 cup sugar, adjusted to the fruit.
- "2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking"The word "Powder" has dropped off in typesetting. Calumet was a double-acting phosphate baking powder; any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes teaspoon for teaspoon.
- "1/2 cups water"Almost certainly 1/2 cup. A cup and a half of water in a covered stewpan with juicy apples would flood the crust. Start with the half cup and less if the apples are very ripe.
- Moderate oven350F. Allow 50 to 60 minutes, until the apples give no resistance to a skewer through the vent and the top crust is set and pale gold.
- Bottom of the ovenThe instruction assumes a range where the floor of the oven was the hottest surface, needed to cook fruit through a metal pan. In a modern oven, set the pan on a preheated baking sheet on the lowest rack for the same effect.
- Lining the stewpan"To within two inches of bottom" is unclear as printed. Read literally, the dough lines the sides and stops two inches short of the pan floor, not short of the rim. Do not stretch the dough thin; it has to hold liquid.
- The doughThis is a biscuit dough, not a pastry. Work the cold butter in to the size of peas, add the milk all at once, and handle it as little as possible. Overworking gives a tough, bready crust rather than a flaky one.
- A ventThe original does not mention one. Cut two or three slits in the top before baking or the steam will lift the lid of dough off the fruit.
- Yield and servingSix to eight servings. Serve it hot from the pan with cream; the crust is too soft to unmould.
Reliable Recipes was one of the promotional cookbooks the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago distributed in the early twentieth century, and every recipe in it exists partly to sell tins of powder, which is why the leavening is named as a brand. The dish itself is older than the booklet: a fruit filling baked under and around a suet or biscuit crust in a deep pot is the English pudding tradition, and the "English" label is often read as setting it apart from the shallow two-crust pie in a tin plate that American cooks meant by apple pie. The switch from a boiled or steamed pudding to an oven-baked one in a stewpan, and from suet to butter and chemical leavening, tells much of the story of American baking in a single recipe.