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Apple Meringue Pie
Pare, slice, stew and sweeten ripe, tart and juicy apples, mash and season with nutmeg, (or stew lemon peel with them for flavor), fill crust and bake till done; spread over the apple a thick meringue made by whipping to froth whites of three eggs for each pie, sweetening with three table-spoons powdered sugar; flavor with vanilla, beat until it will stand alone, and cover pie three-quarters of an inch thick. Set back in a quick oven till well "set," and eat cold. In their season substitute peaches for apples.
A single-crust apple pie with a soft meringue lid, written for a cook who already knew how to line a pie plate. The apples are cooked before they go into the shell, which changes the baking entirely.
- The hinge: spread meringue on warm fillingSpread the meringue while the apple is still hot and push it right out to the pastry rim so it grips the crust. Meringue laid on a cold filling is generally blamed for sliding and for the puddle of syrup that collects under the topping.
- "A quick oven"A hot oven, generally reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat a meringue three-quarters of an inch thick will colour long before the centre sets; 350F for 15-20 minutes gives a browned top and a cooked interior. Watch it rather than timing it.
- "Bake till done" (the shell)Since the apple is already stewed, nothing in the filling needs cooking. The recipe fills the shell and then bakes it; if you would rather guarantee a dry base, blind-bake the crust until dry and lightly coloured, 20-25 minutes at 400F with weights, then fill.
- Sugar in the meringueThree tablespoons for three whites is lean by current practice, which runs to about two tablespoons of sugar per white. Less sugar means a softer, less stable foam that beads and weeps sooner; superfine or powdered sugar added slowly, after the whites hold soft peaks, dissolves best.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives none for the fruit. Reckon about 2 1/2 lb tart apples per 9-inch pie, which cooks down to roughly 3 cups of mash, sweetened to taste since stewing apples vary wildly in acidity.
- Flavouring the applesThe lemon-peel option most likely means strips of peel stewed with the fruit rather than zest stirred in; the recipe does not say to remove them, though peel is easily lifted out. Use pared peel with no white pith.
- "Eat cold"Cool at room temperature and serve the same day. Refrigeration makes a soft meringue sweat and the blind-baked base go limp, and this style of topping does not improve overnight.
- The peach versionPeaches are wetter than apples. Peel, stew and drain them well, or reduce the juice down before mashing, or the filling will loosen under the meringue.
Meringue-topped fruit pies belong to the late nineteenth-century American dessert repertoire, when reliable egg beaters and cheap refined sugar made a whipped-white topping a matter of a few minutes' work rather than sustained labour with a bundle of twigs or a knife blade. The Dixie Cook-Book's logic is thrift as much as show: the yolks went into custards, sauces or a boiled dressing, and the whites went on top of the pie. Stewing the fruit before it reached the shell seems to have been common enough in the period for apples that were tough, dry from storage, or simply too sour to trust to the oven, and it also let the cook taste and correct the sweetening, something no filled-raw pie allows. The instruction to substitute peaches "in their season" is a reminder that the book was written for households eating what was ripe within a few miles of the kitchen.