Apple Pies
1. Pare the apples and slice them off the cores into a bright pan or brass kettle. To every pound allow on an average a quarter pound of white sugar and a cupful of water. Throw in 6 cloves or some lemon peel for flavor, shut with a tight lid and led stew slowly in the steam. Mash through a colander. Bake in open pies. Apples of poor quality that turn blue in cooking are often improved by the addition of the juice of a lemon. 2. Apples cored and quartered and stewed in flavored syrup like preserves without breaking may be filled into shell pies or vol-au-vents baked separately, as explained further on. For every pound of the apple quarters allow 6 ounces of sugar and half cup of water with cloves and lemon peel. Let the syrup boil first, throw in the apple quarters and shut in the steam. Simmer half an hour without stirring them. 3. Early green apples. Wash and steam them whole. Mash through a colander, add sugar, butter and cinnamon or nutmeg. Bake with a top crust. Powd red sugar over when done. 4. Sliced apple pie. Use this way only the best ripe cooking apples Pare and core them and slice them thin across the core. Fill paste-lined pie pans, about 2 layers deep. Thinly cover the apple slices with sugar and grate nutmeg over. Put in each pie butter size of a walnut and a large spoonful of water. Bake without a top crust slowly and dry. The apples become transparent and half candied.
Four methods for one filling: sauced, in whole quarters, steamed green apples, and raw slices baked dry. The ratios are the useful part; the vessels and oven language need translating.
- Skip the brass kettleA "bright pan or brass kettle" was prized because scoured copper or brass conducts heat evenly, but acidic fruit sitting in unlined copper or brass picks up metallic off-flavors and dissolved copper. Use stainless steel or enameled cast iron; the results are identical.
- "Open pies" means no top crustNumbers 1, 2 and 4 are single-crust pies. Only number 3 gets a lid. "Shell pies" and vol-au-vents in number 2 are baked blind and filled after, so the apple quarters must hold their shape.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives none. A filled single-crust apple pie wants 400F for the first 20 minutes to set the pastry, then 350F until the fruit is done. Number 4, baked "slowly and dry," is closer to 325-350F for 50-60 minutes, which is what drives off the water and half-candies the slices.
- Sugar ratiosMethod 1 is 4 oz sugar per pound of apples; method 2 is 6 oz per pound, the heavier syrup presumably helping the quarters hold together. Both suit tart cooking apples and leave room to adjust.
- "Powd red sugar"A typesetting slip for powdered sugar, which in this period meant finely ground sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Either works dusted over the finished top crust.
- Why some apples turn blueBlue-gray discoloration in cooked apples is usually attributed to polyphenols reacting with iron from the pan, and in some fruit to pigments shifting color as acidity falls. The lemon juice works by acidifying the fruit.
- Don't stir the quartersIn method 2 the syrup must be boiling before the apples go in, and the pan stays covered and unstirred for the full half hour. Stirring breaks the quarters down into method 1.
- Method 4 needs the right appleThin raw slices baked dry will collapse into mush if the apple is soft or mealy. Use a firm variety that holds up — Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Braeburn — and slice across the core so the pieces are thin rounds.
- YieldThe book gives no pan size or yield. Expect roughly a pound of pared apples per shell for the sauced version, and more for the sliced version at "2 layers deep."
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals written for cooks working bakeshop and hotel pastry stations, which is why the instructions read as ratios and methods rather than as a single fixed recipe -- a professional needed to turn out apple pie from whatever the season delivered, from "early green apples" through the best keeping varieties in winter. The four numbered approaches map onto four different problems: what to do with plentiful ordinary fruit (mash it), how to fill a pre-baked shell or vol-au-vent so the fruit still looks like fruit (poach quarters in syrup), how to use early green apples (steam and sieve), and how to show off good ripe apples (slice thin, bake slow, let them candy). The brass kettle and "bright pan" reflect a kitchen where copper and brass were still in ordinary use for preserving work; the warning about apples that "turn blue in cooking" is the practical version of a lesson about acid and pigment.