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October 17
Menu: Baked Veal Cutlet; Potatoes Scalloped with Green Peppers; Succotash; Spinach Salad; Apple Pie, Whipped Cream; Coffee Apple Pie-Core, peel and cut in halves 8 tart apples. Line pie plate with Crisco pastry, and fill with apples; sprinkle over 3 tablespoons sugar, 1/2 teaspoonful cinnamon, or nutmeg and cloves, and 2 tablespoons Crisco in small pieces. Bake till apples are soft, then, at the last moment cover with 1 cupful whipped cream, and send to table.
A single-crust open apple pie from the dated menu calendar at the back of the Crisco book. The instructions assume a cook who already knows her oven; the numbers below fill in what the original leaves out.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the book predates reliable oven thermostats. Start at 425F for 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 375F and bake until the apples yield easily to a knife tip, roughly 45 to 55 minutes total.
- Halved applesHalves genuinely take that long to soften and will leave large gaps in the filling. Quartering or thick-slicing the eight apples gives a more even pie and cuts the baking time by 10 to 15 minutes.
- Crisco pastryThe book has its own Crisco pastry recipe elsewhere in the volume; a standard shortening crust of about 2 cups flour, 2/3 cup Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon salt and ice water will stand in for it. Any all-shortening or shortening-and-butter crust behaves much the same way. Modern Crisco has been reformulated to reduce trans fats, so chill the dough well before rolling.
- SugarThree tablespoons is very restrained for eight tart apples by current tastes; half a cup is nearer most modern apple-pie recipes, though the low-sugar version is worth trying once with genuinely sweet-tart fruit.
- The whipped creamThis is the hinge. The cream goes on off the heat, just before serving, not in the oven: spread on a pie straight from the oven it slumps into soup. Let the pie cool until it is no more than warm, then cover and serve immediately.
- No top crustOnly the plate is lined, so the filling is exposed and the apple edges will brown and dry. Tent loosely with foil once the surface has coloured.
- YieldThe recipe gives no plate size; eight apples is generous for a standard modern 9-inch plate, so use a deep-dish pan or hold back a couple of them. Six to eight servings.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after the company launched Crisco as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening in the United States, and the recipes were compiled by the cookery writer Marion Harris Neil. The book's closing "Calendar of Dinners" assigns menus to every date of the year, which is why this pie carries the label October 18 rather than a proper headnote; the coffee in the section title belongs to the rest of that day's meal. The commercial argument running under the whole volume is that a shortening made from cottonseed oil was cleaner and more consistent than lard or butter, and that it kept without refrigeration in a period when many households still had none. Dotting Crisco over the apples in place of the butter an older cookbook would have called for is the point being made, quietly, in the middle of an ordinary autumn apple pie.