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Pies
PPLE PIE, No. I-Slice the apples thin and directly into the lined pie-dish. Do not fill too deeply. Add one-fourth cup of water, one cup of sugar and one teaspoon of cinnamon, sprinkling the spice on top of the sugar, and bake for one hour.
APPLE PIE, No. 2-Line the plate with the plain crust and fill with thinly sliced tart apples. Add a little water and cover with top crust, making it a little richer than the under one. This is easily done by rolling in bits of butter and folding the paste. several times. Cut a few slits in the center to allow steam to escape while cooking. Brush with beaten yolk of egg. When baked, and while still hot, remove top crust carefully, add sugar, nutmeg and a little butter and beat in well with the cooked apple. Replace the top crust and dust with powdered sugar. This is an old fashioned method and apple pies seasoned in this way are much better than when seasoned before baking.
DEEP DISH APPLE PIE (English) - Invert a heavy china cup in the center of a baking-dish. Fill dish full of tart apples, pared, cored, and cut in pieces. Cover dish with either puff or plain paste, cutting slashes in the paste to allow for escaping steam, and rolling the paste a little thicker than for ordinary pies. 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. Replace the top crust, sift over with sugar and serve hot with a hard sauce. The cup will be found full of juice.. When serving, slip knife under bottom of cup to give vent to the confined juice, which will then mix with the apple.
APPLE (or PEACH) MERINGUE PIE-Stew the fruit and sweeten to taste; mash it smooth and season with nutmeg. Bake the pie (no top crust) till just done. Whip to a stiff froth the whites of three eggs, add three tablespoons of powdered sugar, flavor with rose water or vanilla and beat till it will stand alone; spread it over the pie from one-half to one inch thick and put back into the oven till the meringue is well set. Serve cold.
Four apple pies in one entry, and the interesting ones are Nos. 2 and 3, where the fruit is baked plain and seasoned only after the crust comes off. The book assumes you know your own oven, so the numbers below are the missing half of the instructions.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given for any of the four. Start a double-crust apple pie at 425F for the first 15-20 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then drop to 375F for the remainder of the hour. The deep-dish version, with its thicker crust, is best held at 400F for its three-quarters of an hour.
- "Line the plate"A pie plate, not a dinner plate. Period pie plates were shallow tin or earthenware rounds, commonly somewhere around eight to ten inches across; the shallowness is probably why No. 1 warns against filling too deeply, since a heaped pie in a shallow dish may not cook through in an hour.
- The inverted cupThis is the hinge of the English deep-dish pie and it is not decoration. The cup holds the pastry up off the fruit as the apples collapse, and juice is drawn up under its rim, so the filling stays thick instead of flooding the crust. Any small heavy heatproof cup or an actual pie funnel does the job. Warn people at the table before you lift the knife under it.
- Season after baking, not beforeThe reasoning behind No. 2 is sound. Sugar added before baking draws water out of the slices and they slump into sauce; apples baked with only a splash of water hold their shape, and beating in sugar, butter and nutmeg while hot gives a rougher, fresher-tasting filling. Work quickly and support the lifted lid with a wide spatula so it does not crack.
- Rolling in butterThe "richer" top crust is a quick rough puff: dot the rolled plain paste with cold butter, fold in thirds, roll and fold again, chilling if it softens. The recipe says to fold "several times"; two or three turns is enough for a lid you can still lift off whole.
- Meringue timingThree whites and three tablespoons of sugar make a soft French meringue, not a stable Swiss or Italian one. Set it at 350F for about 12-15 minutes, until beige-tipped and firm to the touch. Spread it right to the pastry edge or it will shrink and weep as it cools.
- Rose waterStill sold, and still worth having, but the concentrated rose essences and extracts on the shelf today are far stronger than rose water itself. If you have an essence rather than a true rose water, start with a quarter teaspoon or less in the meringue and taste.
- Hard sauceAssumed knowledge in this book: butter creamed with powdered sugar and flavoured with vanilla, brandy or nutmeg, chilled firm and served in a lump on the hot pie so it melts. Roughly half a cup of butter to a cup of sugar.
- YieldNo pie size is stated; on a standard modern 9-inch plate each of the flat pies serves roughly six to eight, and the deep-dish about six. All are better warm, except the meringue, which the original insists on serving cold.
The Butterick Publishing Company sold dress patterns, and its cook book was aimed at the same readership: women running a household on a budget and expected to produce pie regularly rather than occasionally. That may be why four apple pies appear crowded into a single entry with almost no explanation of the pastry. The deep-dish pie labelled "English" reflects a British tradition of baking fruit pies as a deep dish of fruit under a single lid, with no bottom crust, and the inverted cup serves the same purpose as the ceramic pie funnel or "pie bird" of English kitchens. The instruction to season after baking, which the author calls "an old fashioned method" even in 1911, points back to an earlier habit of treating sugar and spice as a dressing rather than as part of the filling.