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Apple Pie (Roll the paste and fill)
Roll the paste and fill with apples as above. Dust lightly with salt only, fit on the upper crust, but do not press the crust together at the edges, and bake until the apples are cooked and the crusts nicely browned. Take from the oven, slip from the tin or pan in which it was baked, to a warm plate on which it is to be served. Remove the upper crust carefully, season the apples to taste, add sugar and a little butter; replace the upper crust, and serve warm.
This is the second of a pair of apple pie methods; the sugar goes in after baking rather than before, which is the whole point of the recipe and the reason the crust edges are left unsealed.
- The hinge: leave the edges looseThe top crust is meant to come off in one piece at the table, so the rim is only laid on, not crimped or moistened. Cut vents anyway, and expect some juice to escape at the sides; bake on a sheet pan to catch it.
- "As above" means the preceding recipeWhich is not reproduced here, so the filling method has to be inferred: apples pared, cored and sliced into the lined tin. Firm tart cooking apples hold their shape best; a soft dessert apple will slump into sauce and make the crust harder to lift.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, directing only that it bake "until the apples are cooked and the crusts nicely browned." In a modern oven, a hot start of around 425F for 20 minutes to set and brown the bottom crust, then 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes until a knife slides through the fruit, works well.
- Unsweetened fruit behaves differentlyWithout sugar in the tin the apples are likely to give up less liquid, so judge doneness by the fruit rather than the clock. Nothing is added to thicken the juice either, and the seasoning happens only once the pie is opened.
- Seasoning at the tableThe recipe says only "sugar and a little butter," to taste, and gives no pan size. For a pie of roughly nine inches, something like 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar and 2 tablespoons butter stirred into the hot fruit is a reasonable starting point, with cinnamon or nutmeg if you want it. The heat of the apples melts the butter and dissolves the sugar without further cooking.
- "Slip from the tin"This works best with a shallow metal pie tin and a well-browned bottom crust; a deep glass or ceramic dish is much less likely to release. If it will not budge, lift the top crust in place and serve from the dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives neither pan size nor yield; a nine-inch pie would give six to eight servings. Serve warm, as directed, since the butter and sugar are only just stirred in.
Adding the sugar after baking rather than before turns up in more than one nineteenth-century American cookbook, and the reasoning usually given is practical: sugar draws juice out of the fruit during baking, which can flood the crust and leave the bottom sodden. Salting alone during baking and sweetening the hot fruit afterwards would also have let a household adjust the sweetness to whatever apples it had, which varied from variety to variety and season to season before uniform commercial fruit. How widely the method was used, whether cooks actually debated it, and how far it survives in modern deep-dish or cobbler desserts are not things this recipe can tell us.