In cooking, an apple pie is a fruit pie (or tart) in which
the principal filling ingredient is apples (Cooking Apples). Pastry is generally used top-and-bottom, making a double-crust pie, the upper crust of which may be a pastry
lattice woven of strips; exceptions are deep-dish apple pie with a top crust
only, and open-face Tarte Tatin.
Ingredients
Cooking apples (culinary apples, colloquially cookers), such as the
Bramley, are crisp and acidic. The fruit for the pie can be fresh, canned, or
reconstituted from dried apples. This affects the final texture, and the length of cooking time
required; whether it has an effect on the flavour of the pie is a matter of opinion. Dried or preserved apples were originally
substituted only at times when fresh fruit was unavailable.
The English pudding
"For to Make Tartys in Applis", 18th century print of a 14th century recipe
English apple pie recipes go back to the time of Chaucer. The 1381 recipe (see
illustration at right) lists the ingredients as good apples, good spices, figs, raisins and pears. The cofyn of the recipe is a casing of pastry. Saffron is used
for colouring the pie filling.
A traditional way to serve apple pie, particularly in Yorkshire, is with cheese. This adds a deep flavor. This is commonly a hard crumbly cheese such as Cheshire when served separately or Cheddar when cooked as a
layer within the pie.
In Commonwealth countries, apple pie is a dessert of enduring popularity, eaten hot or cold, on its own or with
ice cream, double cream, or custard
Absence of sugar in early English recipe
Most modern recipes for apple pie require an ounce or two of sugar, but the earliest recipe does not. There are two possible
reasons.
Cane sugar imported from Egypt was not widely available in fourteenth-century England,
where it cost between one and two shillings a pound — one
source claims that this is roughly the equivalent of US$100 per kg in today's prices). [1]
The absence of sugar in the recipe may instead indicate that, because refined sugar was a recent introduction from the Orient,
the medieval English did not have quite as sweet a tooth as their descendants. Honey, which was many times cheaper, is also
absent from the recipe, and the "good spices" and saffron, all imported, were no less expensive and difficult to obtain than
refined sugar. Despite the expense, refined sugar did appear much more often in published recipes of the time than honey,
suggesting that it was not considered prohibitively expensive. With the exception of apples and pears, all the ingredients in the
filling probably had to be imported. And perhaps, as in some modern "sugar-free" recipes, the juice of the pears was intended to
sweeten the pie. [2]
Dutch style
Dutch apple pie (appeltaart or appelgebak) recipes go back a long way.
Dutch recipes typically also call for flavourings such as cinnamon and lemon juice to be added, and Dutch apple pies are usually decorated in a lattice style. Dutch apple pies contain
the regular ingredients plus others including raisins and icing.
Apple pie in American culture
In the English colonies the apple pie had to wait for carefully planted pips, brought in barrels across the Atlantic, to become fruit-bearing apple trees, to be selected for their cooking qualities, as apples do
not come true from seeds. In the meantime, the colonists were more
likely to make their pies, or "pasties", of meat rather than of fruit; and the main use for apples, once they were available, was
in cider. But there are American apple-pie recipes, both manuscript and printed, from the
eighteenth century, and it has since become a very popular dessert.
A mock apple pie made from crackers was apparently invented by pioneers on the move during the nineteenth century who were bereft of apples. In the 1930s, and for many years
afterwards, Ritz Crackers promoted a recipe for mock apple pie using its product, along
with sugar and various spices.
Although apple pies have been eaten since long before the discovery of America, "as American as apple pie" is a common saying
in the United States, meaning "typically American". [3] The
dish was also commemorated in the phrase "for mom and apple pie" - supposedly the stock answer of soldiers in WWII, whenever
journalists asked why they were going to war[citation needed].
Advertisers exploited the patriotic connection in the 1970s with the TV jingle "baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet".
There are claims [1] that the Apple
Marketing Board of New York State used such slogans as "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" and "as American as apple pie!",
and thus "was able to successfully 'rehabilitate' the apple as a popular comestible" in the early twentieth century when
prohibition outlawed the production of cider.
An apple pie was also the subject of a running gag throughout the movie American Pie
(film), where Jason Biggs' character masturbates with a "homemade American apple pie".
Other meanings of "Apple pie"
- An "apple-pie bed" is one which has been short-sheeted as a prank. May be so-called because
the sheets are doubled over "like the cover of an apple turnover." [4]
- "Apple-pie order" meaning to be tidy and in good order, may not refer to the pastry at all, but may be a juncture loss of the French nappes pliées, "neatly folded
linen." [5]
See also
References
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)