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Aunt Lucy's Apple Custard Pie
Peel some apples, stew until tender, (not too much water), put through the colander; for one pie take three eggs, one-third cup butter, one-third sugar, flavour with lemon (fresh or extract), and nutmeg, use only the yolks of the eggs in the pie, and cover with the whites, and brown the same as for lemon pies.
A single-crust apple custard with a meringue lid, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what she was doing. The gaps are mostly quantities, and one of them matters.
- How much appleThe recipe never says. For a 9-inch pie you want about 1 1/2 cups of thick, smooth apple purée — roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of peeled tart apples stewed down. Too little and the filling is a plain custard; too much and it will not set.
- "One-third sugar"The measure is genuinely ambiguous — it almost certainly means one-third cup, matching the butter in the phrase before it, but it could be read as a third of a teacup. Start with a third of a cup and taste the purée before it goes in, since apple sweetness varies wildly.
- Stew with restraint"Not too much water" is the hinge. A watery purée will weep under the meringue and soak the crust. Stew the apples covered with only a few tablespoons of water, then cook uncovered until the purée mounds on a spoon.
- No milk or creamWhere many custard pies of the period are bound with milk or cream, this one relies on three yolks and the apple itself. Do not add dairy to loosen it; the set depends on the pur"4,
- The crustAssume an unbaked single bottom crust, which is how nineteenth-century pie recipes are almost always meant. Given the wet filling, partly baking the shell first at 400F for 12 minutes gives a better base.
- OvenBake the filled pie at 350F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the centre barely trembles. A custard baked hot enough to bubble will curdle and crack.
- "Brown the same as for lemon pies"Beat the three whites to soft peaks with about 3 tablespoons sugar, spread to the crust edge so it seals, and return to a 350F oven for 12 to 15 minutes until the tips colour. Sealing to the pastry is what keeps the meringue from shrinking into an island.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Cool completely before cutting — warm apple custard slices into a puddle.
The Home Cook Book belongs to a genre that flourished in North America after the 1870s: the compiled charity cookbook, assembled from recipes contributed by named local women and sold to raise money, in this case for a hospital. That is why so many entries carry a personal tag like "Aunt Lucy's" — the name was the credential, and readers of the original edition would have known whose kitchen it came from. The dish itself sits in a long line of fruit-and-egg pies in which stewed apple takes the place of the milk in a plain custard, a thrifty move in households where apples were stored by the barrel and cream was not always to hand. The meringue finish, borrowed here explicitly from lemon pie, spread quickly in the second half of the century as reliable ovens and cheap refined sugar made whipped whites practical for everyday baking rather than company confectionery.