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Centennial Apple Pie
Miss L. Winstanley.
Peel one dozen and a half of good apples, take out the cores, cut them small, put into a stew pan that will just hold them with a little water, a little cinnamon, two cloves, the rind of a lemon; stew over a slow fire until quite soft, then sweeten them, pass it through a hair sieve, add the yolks of four eggs and one white, quarter of a pound of good butter, half a nutmeg, the peel of a lemon grated, and the juice of one lemon; beat all well together; line the inside of the pie dish with good puff paste; put in the pie and bake half an hour.
This is not a double-crust apple pie but a smooth apple custard baked in pastry — closer to an English apple pudding than to what most people picture. The apples are cooked down, sieved, then enriched with butter, eggs and lemon.
- Fish out the cloves and lemon rindThe two cloves and the strip of lemon rind go in for the stewing only. A hair sieve — a fine-mesh sieve, or a food mill — will catch them along with the skins and fibre, but check, because a whole clove left in a slice is unpleasant.
- Quantities in modern termsEighteen apples is roughly 5 lb, cooking down to several cups of purée. A quarter pound of butter is 1 stick (113 g). Sweetening is left to the cook: start at 3/4 cup sugar for tart apples and taste while the purée is warm.
- Half a nutmeg is a lotGrated whole, half a nutmeg comes to something over a teaspoon, which will dominate everything. A rounded half-teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg is closer to what a modern palate expects.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Puff paste needs real heat to rise, but the egg filling will curdle if pushed: 400F for the first 15 minutes, then down to 350F for the remaining 15 to set the custard. It is done when the centre barely wobbles.
- "Put in the pie""The pie" here most likely means the filling, not a second crust. The recipe calls only for lining the dish with puff paste and gives no top crust.
- Cool the purée firstBeat in the eggs only after the sieved apple has dropped to lukewarm, or you will get threads of scrambled egg. The butter can go in while it is still warm so it melts through.
- Pastry basePuff paste under a wet filling goes soggy. Line the dish, chill it hard, and blind-bake for 10 minutes before filling.
- YieldEnough for two 9-inch shells, or one deep 10-inch dish. Serve at room temperature or cold; the custard firms considerably as it sits.
The name evokes the recipe's moment: 1876 was the year of the United States Centennial and the great Exhibition at Philadelphia, and "Centennial" was a mark of patriotic currency, though editions of The Home Cook Book circulated from the mid-1870s — a Chicago edition is dated 1874, a Toronto one 1877 — so the title alone cannot fix the recipe's date. The dish itself is older and English in construction — a sieved apple purée bound with egg yolks, butter and lemon, baked in pastry, a formula that appears through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery under names like apple pudding or apple tart. What makes the page characteristic of this book is the attribution: The Home Cook Book was assembled from recipes contributed by named local women, so Miss L. Winstanley's apple pie is a household recipe printed more or less as she gave it, including its assumption that the reader already knows how deep a pie dish should be and how hot her own stove runs.