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Sliced-Apple Pie
Line pie-pan with crust, sprinkle with sugar, fill with tart apples sliced very thin, sprinkle sugar and a very little cinnamon over them, and add a few small bits of butter, and a table-spoon water; dredge in flour, cover with the top crust, and bake half to three-quarters of an hour; allow four or five table-spoons sugar to one pie. Or, line pans with crust, fill with sliced apples, put on top crust and bake; take off top crust, put in sugar, bits of butter and seasoning, replace crust and serve warm. It is delicious with sweetened cream. Crab-apple pie, if made of "Transcendents," will fully equal those made of larger varieties of the apple.--- Mrs. D. Buxton.
A plain double-crust apple pie of the kind that assumed the cook already knew her pastry and her stove. Two methods are given: the usual filled-and-baked pie, and a second in which the sugar and butter go in after baking.
- Oven temperatureNo oven guidance is given at all, as was usual before reliable oven regulation. As a modern equivalent, start at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and brown the bottom crust, then drop to 350-375F for the remainder; the stated half to three-quarters of an hour is consistent with that range.
- "Dredge in flour"This means scattering flour over the fruit as a thickener, not coating anything. One to two tablespoons is the usual amount for a nine-inch pie, more if the apples are very juicy.
- Sugar quantityFour or five tablespoons for a whole pie is restrained by modern standards, a quarter to a third of a cup. It suits genuinely tart apples; with a sweeter supermarket variety you would want less, not more.
- Tart apples, sliced very thinThe thin slicing matters more than the variety. There is only a tablespoon of added water here, so the apples must cook down in their own juice, and thick wedges will still be crunchy when the crust is done. Bramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy or Rhode Island Greening all behave well.
- The second methodBaking the apples plain, then lifting the top crust to add sugar and butter, gives a fresher, less caramelised fruit flavour and a crust that has not been sweetened from beneath. Lift the lid with a wide spatula while the pie is hot and it will usually come away in one piece.
- "Transcendents"A named crab-apple cultivar, small, yellow-and-red, very tart and high in pectin. Any culinary crab apple will do the same job; they need coring and slicing but not peeling, and they will want more sugar than the four or five tablespoons specified for dessert apples.
- Sweetened creamMost likely pouring cream with sugar stirred in, served cold over the warm slice, rather than whipped cream. A heavy or single cream with about a teaspoon of sugar per half cup would suit.
- YieldThe recipe reckons by "one pie"; a nine-inch pan is the nearest modern equivalent. No pastry is given; any standard double-crust recipe will serve.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the great wave of American community and regional compilations of the 1880s, in which recipes arrived signed by the contributor, as this one is by Mrs. D. Buxton. Sliced-apple pie, as against the older practice of stewing apples first or using dried fruit soaked overnight, depended on having good keeping apples on hand through the winter. The second method here, baking the fruit under a lid and sweetening it afterward, might be read as an old economy as much as a refinement: sugar added at the end may go further than sugar cooked into the juice. The recommendation of "Transcendents" places the book in the era when named crab-apple cultivars were being promoted by nurseries for the small home orchard; the Transcendent was among the most widely planted of them, valued for jelly and for exactly this sort of pie, and its tartness and high pectin explain why it could stand in for a larger apple without going watery.