Apple Pie
- 4 to 6 tart apples
1 tablespoon butter
- ¼ cup water
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 egg-yolk
Powdered sugar
1 cup 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.
DEEP-DISH APPLE PIE (ENGLISH) 4 to 6 tart apples
1 teaspoon butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup hard sauce
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Invert a heavy china cup in the center of a baking-dish. Fill the dish full of apples, pared, cored and cut in slices. Cover the dish with plain paste rolled a little thicker than usual, and slashed to allow the steam to escape. Bake for three-quarters of an hour, then remove from oven, and, with a knife, carefully pry up the crust and season with sugar, cinnamon and butter. When serving, slip the knife under the cup to allow the confined juice to mix with the apple. Serve the pie hot with a hard sauce.
Two apple pies, both built on the same trick: the fruit is baked plain and sweetened afterward, under a lifted lid. A few gaps need filling before either goes in the oven.
- Oven heatNeither pie is given a temperature. Bake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and brown the bottom crust, then drop to 350F until the apples give no resistance to a knife — about 45 minutes total for the plate pie, and the stated three-quarters of an hour for the deep dish, which will likely want closer to an hour with a full dish of fruit.
- The point of sugaring lateThis is the hinge of the recipe, not a quirk. Sugar draws juice out of raw apples and you get a flooded, soupy filling with a gap under the lid. Baked dry with only ¼ cup water, the slices hold their shape; the sugar and butter added afterward melt into a glaze rather than a syrup.
- Lifting the crustSlide a thin knife all the way around the rim before you try to raise the top, and lift with a wide spatula rather than your fingers. Work fast while everything is hot, and expect the crust to crack somewhere — the final dusting of powdered sugar will help hide it.
- A richer top crustRolling bits of fat into the paste and folding it several times is rough puff pastry in all but name. Three or four folds with chilled butter is plenty; more and the layers slide apart when you pry the lid off.
- NutmegA full teaspoon of nutmeg is assertive by current taste, and it is listed but never actually added in the instructions — sprinkle it over the apples with the sugar at the lifting stage. Half a teaspoon of freshly grated is closer to modern taste.
- Butter substituteThe phrase dates the book. It means margarine or a vegetable shortening. Butter is better here, since it is added off the heat and tasted directly.
- The inverted cupA heavy china teacup, upside down in the middle of the dish, does two jobs: it props the pastry so it does not sag onto the fruit, and it traps juice underneath that is released at the table. A ceramic pie bird or a small ovenproof ramekin does the same. Use nothing with a glaze you would not put in a 400F oven.
- Hard sauceEasily made at home. Beat about ½ cup softened butter with 1 cup sifted powdered sugar until pale, then flavor with vanilla, brandy or rum, and chill firm. It is served cold in a lump so it melts over the hot pie.
- YieldThe first makes one pie, as the recipe states; the quantities suit a standard 9-inch pan and about six servings. The deep dish depends on your baking dish; a 2-quart dish packed with apples serves six to eight.
The Butterick books were published by the pattern company as part of a broad line of domestic manuals aimed at the same readers who bought its dress patterns, and the tone throughout is instructive rather than antiquarian — which makes the note "this is an old-fashioned method" worth pausing on. Sugaring a pie after baking rather than before was evidently, by the time the book appeared, something the writer regarded as a survival. The deep-dish version, labeled "English" here, is the older form still: a dish of fruit with a pastry lid and no bottom crust, propped on an inverted cup. Purpose-made ceramic pie funnels, often molded as blackbirds, were sold for exactly this job, but the teacup cost nothing.