No. 3199

Apple Pie

Tarte aux Pommes

Butter a tin plate and lay on it a flat of short paste (No. 135) an eighth of an inch thick; dampen the edges lightly and lay all around a band of puff paste three-sixteenths of an inch thick and three-quarters of an inch wide. Cut four medium apples in four; peel, suppress the cores and pips and mince them up; put them in a vessel, adding two spoonfuls of apple marmalade (No. 3674), three tablespoonfuls of sugar and a pinch of ground cinnamon; stir all together and pour them into the plate, dressing the apples in a dome form; wet the edges of the pie and cover over with a flat of puff paste (No. 146) an eighth of an inch thick and of the same diameter as the pie. Fasten both pastes together, cut away all the surplus and pinch the edges all around; egg over and trace a rosette on top with a small kitchen knife, then bake in a hot oven for three-quarters of an hour to one hour or even an hour and a quarter, according to the thickness of the apples and the heat of the oven.

← No. 3198 Peaches a la Louvoisienne Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3200 Cocoanut Pie →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's apple pie is French in construction: a short-paste base, a puff-paste rim and lid, and a spoonful of thick apple marmalade to bind the raw fruit. A few of his numbers and vessels need translating.

The hinge: the apple marmaladeThe two spoonfuls of marmalade (No. 3674) are a reduced, sugared apple purée, close to a stiff apple butter. It most likely serves to absorb the juice the raw apples throw off, helping keep the base from going slack. Any thick unsweetened or lightly sweetened apple butter works.
"A tin plate"A shallow tin pie plate. The recipe gives no size, but four apples suit a plate of roughly 8 to 9 inches. A modern metal or glass pie dish of that size will serve; metal browns the bottom crust better, which this pie needs.
Oven heatThe recipe calls for a hot oven but gives no temperature, and the book supplies no Fahrenheit equivalent; a hot oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 400-425F. Setting the puff paste at a higher heat and then easing off is one way to manage the long bake. The recipe puts the range of times down to the thickness of the apples and the heat of the oven.
SpoonfulsRanhofer's plain "spoonfuls" are unspecified; read them as tablespoons of marmalade. Three tablespoons of sugar for four apples is modest, though the marmalade brings sweetness of its own.
The applesFour medium apples is about 1 1/4 lb, and "minced up" means chopped small rather than sliced, which is why they mound into a dome. Use a firm cooking apple that holds shape.
SteamThe traced rosette is decoration, not a vent. Cut two or three small slits through the puff lid before baking or the top will balloon away from the fruit.
Two pastesNo. 135 is a short lining paste, No. 146 a puff paste. Butter-based store-bought puff pastry and a standard pâte brisée give a similar effect; the thicknesses given are worth keeping to.
YieldOne pie, perhaps six portions. The page places it among the cold entremets, which suggests it was not necessarily sent out hot from the oven.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry is headed in French — Tarte aux Pommes — over an unmistakably French pastry. A tarte aux pommes built this way — short paste below, puff above, a band of puff around the rim to give the edge height — is often said to follow nineteenth-century Parisian pâtisserie practice, and the cross-references to numbered pastes and to an apple marmalade elsewhere in the book reflect a professional kitchen where those components were made in quantity and drawn on as needed. The trick of binding raw fruit with a spoonful of cooked purée is older than the book and is generally held to be a reliable way to keep a fruit tart's base crisp.