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Saxony Apple Pie
Line a deep dish with puff paste, bake it 10 minutes, fill with 6 large harvest apples, boiled in syrup with cinnamon dusted over, sugar and bits of butter. Pour over them 1 egg beaten with 1 ounce sugar and 1 ounce of chopped almonds, bake this until done, and serve cold.
A blind-baked puff pastry shell filled with syrup-poached apples and set with a thin almond custard. The original assumes you know when to shift the oven down; that is the hinge.
- Two temperatures, not oneThe original names no temperature. In a modern oven, puff paste wants a hot start, around 425F, for the initial 10 minutes so the layers lift before the filling goes in; drop to about 350F once the custard is poured over, or the egg may curdle and weep before the pastry finishes.
- Blind-bake properly"Line a deep dish with puff paste, bake it 10 minutes" is a blind bake, though the original does not say how; in practice weight it with beans or pie weights on parchment, since unweighted puff will balloon and leave no cavity for the apples.
- Harvest applesAn old term for early-season, soft-fleshed cooking apples picked in late summer — Yellow Transparent, Gravenstein and the like. They collapse quickly. Any tart apple that holds together works; six large apples is roughly 2½ to 3 lb, peeled and quartered.
- "Boiled in syrup"No quantity is given. A workable poaching syrup is about 1 cup sugar to 2 cups water, simmered until the apples are just tender, 5 to 10 minutes depending on variety; note that the original dusts cinnamon over the fruit rather than infusing it in the syrup. Drain them well before they go into the shell or the pastry base will go soft.
- The custard is thin by designOne egg with 1 oz sugar (about 2 tablespoons) and 1 oz chopped almonds is a glaze binding the top of the fruit, not a set custard filling. It bakes in 20 to 30 minutes at 350F, until just firm and lightly coloured.
- AlmondsSweet almonds, blanched and chopped fine. Ground almonds will thicken the egg into a frangipane-like layer, which is a different and heavier pie.
- Serve coldThe instruction is in the original, and it also serves a purpose: the custard sets and the syrup stops running. Cool completely in the tin. Serves six to eight.
"Saxony" in Anglo-American cookbooks of the nineteenth century seems to have been a loose label attached to German-inflected sweets, much as "Vienna" was attached to breads; it may well indicate less a specific regional dish than a German manner of doing things — here, the almond-and-egg topping over cooked fruit that runs through central European baking. The structure is closer to a German Apfelkuchen or a French tart than to an American double-crust apple pie: an open shell, fruit already cooked, a binding of egg poured over at the end, and the whole thing eaten cold.