Home › Pastry › Dried Apple Pie
Dried Apple Pie
Very good pies may be made of the "Alden" dried apples, by stewing in a very little water; sweeten and make like any other. The home dried apples are best when stewed very soft, and mashed through a colander. When stewing put in two or three small pieces of lemon or orange peel (previously dried and saved for cooking purposes); flavor with a very little spice of any kind. Sweeten and season before putting into the pie-pan. A beaten egg may be stirred in. Bake with two crusts, rolled thin, and warm slightly before eating.
The recipe assumes you already know how to build a two-crust pie and only tells you how to handle the filling, which is where dried-apple pie goes wrong. The hinge is the stewing: the apples must be cooked to a genuine mash, not merely softened, or the slices stay leathery inside the baked crust.
- Quantities, since none are givenAbout 3 cups (roughly 8 oz) dried apple slices, soaked and then stewed, will fill a 9-inch pie. Figure 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar and a pinch of salt, tasted and adjusted before filling, exactly as the text directs.
- "A very little water"Dried apples drink far more than that phrase suggests. Cover with water, let them stand an hour, then simmer covered until collapsing, adding water in small amounts. You want a thick, spoonable puree; a soupy filling will soak the bottom crust.
- "Alden" dried applesA commercial evaporated apple of the period, dried in heated-air chambers rather than in the sun; the pieces were generally lighter in colour, and the recipe itself implies they needed less coaxing than home-dried fruit. Supermarket dried apple rings are the closest equivalent; unsulphured ones are darker and taste more strongly of apple.
- The dried peelThe recipe assumes a jar of lemon or orange peel saved from earlier cooking. Two or three strips of fresh zest, added during stewing and fished out before filling, does the same work. Do not leave dried peel in the filling; it stays tough.
- Spice"A very little spice of any kind" means cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice or cloves, in the region of 1/2 teaspoon total. Dried apple has a concentrated, slightly caramelized flavor that heavy spicing buries.
- The beaten eggOptional in the original and worth adding: one egg stirred into the cooled puree sets it slightly, giving a filling that slices cleanly rather than running. Stir it in only after the mixture has cooled below scalding, or it will scramble.
- OvenThe book states no oven heat. Bake at 425F for 15 minutes to set the crust, then 350F for 25 to 30 minutes more, until the top is browned. Cut vents in the upper crust.
- Warming before eatingSound advice for a pie made with lard or butter pastry, which firms up hard when cold. Ten minutes in a 300F oven is enough. Yield is 6 to 8 slices.
Dried apple pie was winter pie, the thing you made when the barrel of fresh fruit was gone and dried slices were all that remained. The recipe's mention of a proprietary product is a small marker of its date: the Alden process, an American method of evaporating fruit in heated-air chambers rather than in sun or open air, is generally traced to the 1870s, and this recipe's own wording shows "Alden" apples being used as shorthand for the factory-dried article as against "home dried." The distinction the recipe draws is honest about both. The commercial slices are treated as needing little fuss; home-dried fruit, by the text's account, had to be stewed very soft and pushed through a colander before it was fit for pastry. The saved strips of citrus peel belong to the same economy, a household that dried what it could not afford to throw away.