San Francisco Apple Pie

One of just three apple varieties indigenous to California, the Sierra Beauty is tart, crisp, and juicy. It gets rather soft when cooked, but I still think it makes an excellent pie -- especially if your pie is small, and subjects the apples to less oven time. Come to think of it, why is there so much emphasis on cooking with apples that hold their shape under heat? So long as the apples don't get mealy-stringy mushy, I like a soft creamy filling to contrast with my flaky crisp crust. In fact, two tall, stylish European customers the other day particularly requested "pie apples that get soft like applesauce apples." I led them straight to the basket of Sierra Beauties, of course.

Aside from the Sierra Beauties, the other thing that makes this pie distinctively San Franciscan is that I served it up with Bi-Rite Creamery's salted caramel ice cream. The ice cream is quite intense, so garnish sparingly.

A note on apple peels: when I'm in a big hippie hurry, I don't peel my pie apples. That's just fine for your traditional dry, firm pie apples and your favorite hungry farmer, but it simply won't do for creamy pie apples and San Francisco epicures. The leathery bits of skin will be obnoxiously obvious in the otherwise velvet-soft pie. To balance out the lack of wholesome peels, I've decided that apple pies are much better with MINIMAL sugar. This one has 3 puny tablespoons. I eat it for breakfast at 5 a.m. before cycling off to work at Bi-Rite.

San Francisco Apple Pie

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
Have ready:
one unbaked pie shell
another pastry round for the top

In a large bowl, toss together:
5 medium sierra beauty apples
(peeled, sliced, and cored)
3 T. sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
several gratings of nutmeg
1/2 tsp. salt

Let the apples and sugar macerate while you get the pastry ready: leave an overhanging rim on the bottom crust, and cut pretty patterns out of the center of the top crust.

Arrange the apples in the pastry shell, dab with bits of butter, cover with the top pastry round, and trim it flush with the rim. Then fold the bottom crust's overhang back over the edge of the top crust and flute.

Bake until the crust starts to gild, then reduce the oven temperature to 350 and bake some more until thick juices bubble out of the center holes.

The Settlement Cook Book and Apple Roly-Poly

I stood in the deserted Book Exchange yesterday afternoon, sniffing through the old books, when I noticed a battered volume covered in old yellow shelf paper. Shelf paper is always a good sign. Nobody these days has plain wood shelving they want to cover, and a book must be well-loved to merit a homemade jacket. In thin pencil on the spine were the words, "Settlement Cook Book."

Inside, Mrs. Simon Kander smiles placidly at me, "Very Truly Yours," and I recall that she often sits on well-papered shelves with the likes of Irma Rombauer and Fannie Merritt Farmer. But I don't yet discover her real design -- I slip a dollar in the box and run with my treasure. It's only hours later, back in the city, that I slide the shelf-paper jacket from the book and gasp.


Two-by-two, noses in their cookbooks, are a couple dozen cute little cooks, marching towards a large heart on the horizon and the words, "The way to a man's heart." Come, my apron-clad, man-seeking companions, let us take the road laid out before us as it winds its way through our iceboxes and ranges, through our pies and pickles, through the capillaries and arteries of a manly chest to the heart that lies beating within it. It's a hilarious grotesque, a creepy relic of coy humor, and a fabulous treasure for my shelf.

Mrs. Simon Kander, née Lizzie Black, compiled the first edition of her cookbook in 1903, a charity project to benefit a community of Russian Jews in Milwaukee. That edition also bears the subtitle, "The way to a man's heart," but instead of antlike marching cooks, it depicts a lady playing the flute. Mine is the 30th edition, from 1951. The book is falling apart, and I might need to work some curatorial magic to get it in good enough shape for my own shelf. Since Mrs. Kander herself was German, the cookbook includes kuchen and matzos and spritz krapfen -- and, of course, clear signposts pointing its readers to manly hearts. Is it the Apple Roly-Poly? The Wine Syllabub? Rinktum-Dity?

Apple Roly-Poly
p. 345

Make Plain Pie Crust or Biscuit Dough. Roll out 1/2 inch thick. Spread with chopped apples or jam, raisins, sugar and cinnamon; roll like Jelly Roll. Place in a small baking pan, spread butter over all and add 2 cups of cold water, and bake in a hot oven, basting often, with the sauce in the pan, until done. Serve hot.

(Kander, Mrs. Simon. The Settlement Cook Book. Milwaukee: The Settlement Cook Book Co., 30th ed., 1951).

Bacon Apple Pie

Save your bacon drippings for a pie like your rainy-day childhood fantasies of the sweet-savory territory between ham and mulled cider.

Prepare the crust as usual: grate 1 cup frozen butter into 3 cups well-salted flour, sprinkle on enough water to make a good collection of dough-lumps, and roll out 2/3 of it to the thickness of five thirty-seconds of an inch.  Place it in a large pie dish, trim a half-inch overhang, liberally smear it with bacon drippings saved from breakfast, and put it in the fridge while you butcher up the apples. Refrigerate the unused portion and the scraps.

Take half a dozen or eight large Braeburn apples (roll your 'r's, and linger on that archaically transposed 'ae') and slice, core, and chop them. Peel them if your feel like the trouble. Mix 3 tablespoons flour, 3 tablespoons sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves (like cloves in the ham, right?) and 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg. Toss with the apples. Then mix 1/2 c. honey and several tablespoons strong red wine (the wine takes the place of lemon juice). Toss with the apples and let macerate while you roll out the remaining dough for the lattice top. Preheat the oven to 425.

You should have plenty of dough to work with, which I much prefer to patch-and-stretch, just-enough dough. Use a sharp knife or pizza wheel to cut it in half-or-three-quarter-inch strips. Retrieve the chilling crust and moisten its overhanging rim with a few dabs of water. Turn the apples out in the crust and put little bits of bacon fat all over them. Arrange strips in parallel over the top of the apples (the warp); then, starting from the center, arrange the perpendicular strips (the woof), weaving each strip into the warp as you go. Trim off the ends even with the bottom crust, and press them into it. Fold the overhang back on top, press to seal, and flute.


Slip the pie into the oven, reducing the heat to 350 when the crust is just starting to gild, some 15-20 minutes into the baking. Stack the crust trimmings, press together, and add to your secret stash of pie dough -- which you ought to use up in the next few days, for breakfast turnovers or another pie or cinnamon pinwheels. The pie is done about half an hour after it starts smelling unearthly -- when it bubbles thick towards the center.

Serve warm with ice cream.

Apple Pie

Today, for several reasons, was a good day for pies and the Dresden Dolls. Sometimes it just has to be loud and buttery.

I was baking in my #9 cast iron skillet. Skillet pies are tricky -- they're huge, so the crusts are less structurally sound, and the steep sides also allow crust-slip. Nonetheless, they are a sight worth beholding once or twice, especially if you've left your treasured pie tins back in Virginia, along with your marble rolling pin and a well-used pastry cloth. It's like you just got off the Oregon Trail, but, damn it, you need pie and see if you don't just buckle down and make it in the skillet.

I make the crust with a 3:1 ratio of flour to butter, by volume, plus extra butter proportionate to my mood. A skillet pie takes 3 cups of flour, and today I used two and a half sticks of butter. You tell me how I'm feeling. I froze the butter and grated it like cheese into the flour -- a trick from a fiddler in North Carolina. I also use a lot of salt to heighten the contrast between buttery-savory crust and sweet gooey filling (a tablespoon, today). When the butter's all grated and fluffed into the flour, I drizzle on cold water, tossing the dough lightly with a fork, until it forms a ball when pressed, and there aren't a lot of dry crumbs. This is perhaps more water than most recipes like, but I roll it out with a generous bit of flour, and it comes out lovely.

But rolling's a bitch, especially on a hot summer day when the butter just wants to melt into the flour. First, divide the dough into a large ball and a small ball, refrigerating the small one. Push the dough into a round and pat it down with the rolling pin until it's about half an inch thick. Then roll from the center out, and lift frequently to re-flour the rolling surface (and the top, too). When it's larger than the skillet, accounting for the sides, fold it in half and place it on one side of the pan, then carefully unfold it. I usually have to patch it in places with the scraps. When it's all ready, with a little bit of overhanging dough, stick it in the fridge and make the filling.

Filling: Depending on how thrifty a Mennonite you are, and the ugliness of the apples you salvage, making the filling can take quite a while. Combine 3/4 c. rapadura sugar, 3-4 T. cornstarch, pinch of salt, the juice of half a lemon, and 1-2 tsp. cinnamon. Toss with 6 cups chopped tart miscellaneous baking apples (rot, worms, and worm poop all removed -- but leave the skins if you're not serving Irma Rombauer). Let it all macerate while you make the top crust (the apples will juice up with the sugar on them).

Top Crust: Retrieve the little ball of dough from the fridge, and roll it out just like the bottom crust. Slice it into centimeter-wide strips. Put the filling into the bottom crust, then top with half the strips lined up parallel to each other, with maybe a centimeter between them. Place the first perpendicular strip in the middle of the pie, and weave it under every-other strip. Continue placing perpendicular strips from the center out. Dip your finger in a glass of water, and run it over the rim of the bottom crust (water acts as glue to fuse the lattice). Fold the overhanging bit of bottom crust up over the ends of the lattice strips, press it tightly, and flute it nicely.

Bake it at 450 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 minutes, then place strips of tinfoil around the rim to keep it from burning, reduce the oven to 350 degrees, and bake until it's done (the filling will make thick bubbles near the middle of the pie). Don't break your wrist trying to carry the pie by the skillet handle; it's going to be a ton of pie and will probably require two hands.

And I only use butter, or lard when I'm in Hungary. I do not believe in hydrogenation. Butter helps you absorb fat-soluble minerals, and causes less heart disease than vegetable shortening. If you're concerned about weight, you should be more worried about the sugar in the pie than the fat. And if you're worried about cholesterol....