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Apple Pie (Cut up the fruit into not too)
Cut up the fruit into not too thin slices; lay it on your dish and sprinkle some sugar among it; line the dish with good pastry; put in the fruit, sugar, cinnamon or nutmeg to taste, a dash of salt; cover it with good crust and bake it for an hour.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in turn-of-the-century books: it assumes you already know how much sugar goes into a pie and how hot your oven runs. The proportions below fill the gaps without changing the method.
- Quantities are entirely left to youFor a standard 9-inch pie, figure on about 2 to 2 1/2 lb of apples (6 to 8 medium), peeled and sliced, with 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar depending on the fruit. That yields six to eight slices.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A hot start sets the bottom crust: 425F for the first 15 minutes, then 350F for the remaining 40 to 45 minutes, which lands close to the stated hour.
- "Lay it on your dish"Most likely the cut fruit is arranged on a plate and tossed with sugar while you roll and fit the pastry, rather than the pie being built in two stages, though the wording is ambiguous. Ten or fifteen minutes of standing draws out juice and softens the slices slightly.
- No thickener, by designNo thickener -- the recipe calls for none, and the filling will run juicy. If you want a sliceable filling, toss 2 tablespoons of flour or 1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch through the sugar.
- Choose a firm appleBramley, Granny Smith, Northern Spy or Braeburn hold their shape over a full hour; softer dessert apples collapse to sauce.
- Cut thickness"Not too thin" is the whole instruction and it matters: slices around 1/4 inch cook through in the hour without going to mush. Paper-thin slices will disintegrate.
- Vent the topThe recipe says only to cover with crust. Cut steam vents or the top will dome and split, and seal the rim well, since an unthickened filling boils vigorously.
- The dash of saltNot incidental. With no salt in the fruit, the sweetness reads flat; a scant 1/4 teaspoon among the apples sharpens both the fruit and the spice.
Apple pie appears in nearly every American household book of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, usually in several versions, because apples were the one fruit a household could count on from autumn storage through late winter. The double-crust fruit pie came to America from England, where fruit "coffins" of pastry were baked long before sugar was cheap enough to sweeten them freely; the recipe here offers a choice between cinnamon and nutmeg. The extreme brevity is characteristic of the genre: books like this were written for experienced cooks who needed only a reminder of proportion and order, not instruction. It is also why no quantities appear at all, an omission a modern reader notices immediately and a contemporary one would not have.