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French Apple Pie
Line a plate with puff paste, brush it with egg, prick it with a fork, and bake it until light and brown. Fill it with a mixture of 8 baked apples, free from cores and skin, rubbed to a puree with 4 ounces of sugar, 1 ounce of butter, the grated rind of a lemon, and yolks of 2 eggs. Cook it for 10 minutes, pour it in, and cover with strips of paste. Bake until brown.
A blind-baked puff pastry shell filled with a rich baked-apple puree and latticed over the top. The instructions are compressed to the point of confusion, so read the order of operations before you start.
- Sort out the sequenceAs printed, "Cook it for 10 minutes, pour it in" comes after the filling is described. What is meant is: cook the apple puree with the sugar, butter, lemon rind and yolks for about 10 minutes over low heat to thicken it and set the eggs, then pour it into the baked shell, lattice the top with pastry strips and return it to the oven until the strips brown.
- The hinge is the pureeStir the yolks in off the heat and cook gently, below a simmer. Boiling after the yolks go in will scramble them and the filling will turn grainy rather than glossy.
- "Line a plate"A pie plate, not a dinner plate. A 9-inch shallow pie dish or tart tin suits eight apples' worth of puree.
- Blind bakingThe egg wash glazes and helps seal the surface, and the fork pricking lets steam escape so the base does not balloon. Bake at around 400-425F until dry and browned; weight it with beans or a second tin if the puff wants to lift.
- "Bake until brown"For the final bake, 400F for 15-20 minutes is enough to colour the pastry strips. The filling is already cooked, so this stage is only about the top.
- Weights4 ounces of sugar is about half a cup; 1 ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. That is a restrained amount of sugar for eight apples, so taste the puree and adjust to the fruit.
- ApplesBake them whole until collapsing, then scoop the flesh out and pass it through a sieve or ricer. A tart cooking variety such as Bramley, Granny Smith or Northern Spy suits the puree; cook it down far enough that it holds its shape when sliced.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Best the day it is made, since the puree softens the pastry base overnight.
This is the French tart tradition read through an English-speaking kitchen: a pre-baked shell, a cooked and enriched fruit puree rather than raw slices, and a lattice added at the end for looks. That construction contrasts with the many American apple pies where raw fruit and crust go into the oven together and the filling cooks in place. The enrichment of the apple with butter and egg yolks is close to what French pastry cooks call a marmelade de pommes used as a tart base, and the ten-minute cooking would serve to set the yolks and drive off moisture so the base does not turn to paste. Cookbooks in this vein often labelled dishes "French" as a mark of refinement.