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Apple Pie (Roll a piece of flaky pie)
Roll a piece of flaky pie crust to the thickness desired. Place on a pie pan or dish, shaping it carefully to the dish, and cut off around the edges with a sharp knife. Cover the bottom of the crust with a thin layer of sugar, dust with flour, then fill the crust with quarters of pared and cored apples. Dust them lightly with salt and generously with sugar, especially if they are very tart; roll an upper crust and lay over them, trim around the edges as before; press the upper and lower crusts together and bake half an hour, or until the apples are soft, and the top and bottom crusts are both nicely browned.
A plain double-crust apple pie of the sort assumed to need no explanation in 1900, which means the book leaves out the oven temperature and understates the baking time. Two things need fixing before it works reliably.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, because a cook of the period judged by hand. Start at 425F for 20 minutes to set and brown the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for the remainder.
- The half hour is too shortThe half hour is probably too short -- apple quarters are unlikely to soften fully in 30 minutes, and the recipe itself hedges with 'or until the apples are soft'. Reckon on 50 to 60 minutes total, judging by juice bubbling thickly through the crust and a skewer sliding through the fruit without resistance.
- Cut the apples smallerIf you want to keep to a shorter bake, slice them 1/4 inch thick instead of leaving quarters. Quarters give a chunkier, more old-fashioned pie but need the longer time.
- Sugar and flour on the baseThe flour absorbs juice as the fruit collapses and helps keep the bottom crust from going to paste. The recipe says only a thin layer of sugar and a dusting of flour; for a 9-inch pie, reckon on roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons of each.
- How much sugar"Generously" for tart cooking apples means about 3/4 cup total; for sweeter modern eating apples, 1/2 cup. The pinch of salt is there to sharpen the fruit, and it works.
- Vent the topThe recipe presses the two crusts together and never mentions a steam hole. Cut two or three slits in the top crust or the filling may lift it off the rim.
- ApplesChoose a variety with acidity that holds its shape in the oven: Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Winesap. Bramley has the acidity but collapses to a puree, which suits a chunkier pie less well. Allow around 2 to 2 1/2 lb of whole apples for a 9-inch dish.
- What is not hereNo butter, no cinnamon, no lemon. Plainer versions like this one sat alongside recipes that did call for butter and spice, so read it as one style rather than an omission. Add them if you like, but the plain version is worth trying once.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight wedges. Best eaten the day it is baked, while the crust is still crisp.
American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries print apple pie again and again with almost no commentary, which is itself the point: it was the assumed default of the household baking day. The unspiced, unbuttered version here is the older line of the dish, closer to English fruit pies than to the cinnamon-and-butter style, which is itself well attested in nineteenth-century American cookbooks. The layer of sugar and flour dusted onto the bottom crust is a working cook's fix for uneven ovens, and it still does its job. Apples were the practical winter fruit for this: barrelled in a cellar, they kept for months and were often dried as well, so a pie could be had long after the harvest, and the note about sugaring heavily "if they are very tart" reflects orchards planted for cooking and cider rather than for eating out of hand.