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Apple Custard Pie or Pudding
1 quart of dry stewed apples. 12 ounces of sugar. 3 ounces of butter. 8 yolks of eggs. Juice and rind of 1 lemon and nutmeg.
The apples should be stewed with as little water as possible with the steam shut in. Mash them through a strainer. Cook the pulp over the fire with the sugar and butter in and then add the beaten yolks and flavor. Bake in crusts. And where it is so requisite to have the fine flakes of puff-paste lie straight and undisturbed care must be taken in handling the small portions when rolling out pie crusts. Green people always will take the trimmings of the last pie and work and knead and pound and press it to death. You musn't do that. Lay the scraps in layers in a pile loose on each other. Cut a chunk square and small from the large piece of paste and lay it on top of the scraps, then roll out to a quarter inch thickness. Now you don't want the bottom crust of the pie to be so thick as that--nobody wants to eat so much soggy under crust--but you do want that thickness for the edge. So double the sheet of paste over on itself in half and with the end of the rolling pin roll that part that will be the middle of the pie to half the thickness. You will of course have flour enough about it to prevent sticking together. Then open out the doubled sheet again and you have a hollow thinbottomed sheet of paste just ready to fit the pie pan and with a thick edge to hold in the custards and lemon mixtures.
A rich apple curd baked in pastry — closer to a lemon-apple custard than to a two-crust apple pie. The proportions are hotel-scale and the pastry lecture attached to it is the real lesson of the entry.
- What the quart meansA quart of "dry stewed apples" is the cooked, drained pulp, not the raw fruit. Expect to start with about 3 lb of tart apples to finish with 4 cups of thick sieved pulp.
- Weights to volume12 oz sugar is about 1 3/4 cups; 3 oz butter is 6 tablespoons. The filling is measured by weight because it was made in quantity, and weighing still gives the truer result.
- Stew it dryThe instruction to use as little water as possible with the steam shut in is the hinge. Any extra liquid has to be driven off later or the custard will never set, so cover the pan tightly and cook the apples down until they hold their shape on a spoon.
- Tempering the yolksThe pulp is hot with sugar and butter cooked in when the eight beaten yolks go in. Take the pan off the heat and stir a ladle of the hot pulp into the yolks first, then return the mixture; added cold and directly, the yolks will scramble and the filling will be grainy.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven instruction beyond "Bake in crusts." As a modern working suggestion, start hot, around 425F for the first 10 to 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 325-350F until the center is just barely wobbling, roughly 30 to 40 minutes. A custard filling held at high heat will curdle and weep.
- Lemon rind"Rind" here means the zest only, grated or pared finely with none of the white pith. In this quantity of filling one lemon's zest and juice is a background note, not the dominant flavor.
- The pastry methodWhitehead's point about the trimmings is sound and still taught: re-rolled scraps stacked loosely in layers keep their laminations, while scraps kneaded into a ball lose them entirely. The trick of folding the sheet, thinning only the center with the end of the pin, then unfolding gives a thin base and a thick rim in one pass.
- YieldThe filling as written fills two 9-inch pies generously, or three shallow ones. Halve it for a single pie. Serve at room temperature or cold; hot, the custard has not finished setting.
The American Pastry Cook came out of Jessup Whitehead's run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which explains both the scale of the recipe and the scolding tone directed at "green people" — his readers were apprentices on a bake shop bench, and the pastry instruction is worth more to them than the filling. The dish itself sits in a long line of English and American apple curds and apple custards, where sieved fruit pulp is enriched with butter and yolks in the same manner as lemon cheese or lemon curd; the distinction between calling it a pie or a pudding is often said to have turned on whether it was baked in pastry or in a dish, though the usage was never fixed. Recipes of this type were common in the period, and a quantity of eight yolks would have been unremarkable in a bakeshop that used whites for icings, meringues and angel cakes.