An Abundance of Apples

     

We are long in apples right now. Sauce apples, eating apples, cider apples, baking apples, apples my grandmother loved, new-fangled apples (most too sweet for my taste). I stick to my favorites as I find them—I picked up some Jonathans, Cortlands, and Macintosh, last week—and then try local varieties that I haven’t seen before. Last year it was Arkansas Blacks. This year it’s the Wolf River. It looks very much like our Rhode Island Greening (hard to find, now), but not as versatile. Still, I was glad to find it.

The abundance of apples to be had for a very good price got me thinking about how much I absolutely love to cook and bake with this fruit. In fact—and I thought about this long and hard before putting down the words—if I had to choose apples over my other fruit obsession, sour cherries, I think I would have to go with the apples. This feels a little like choosing which of your children is your favorite. While everyone says that’s not possible, there is some recent research saying that, actually, you can—that people do have favorites among their children. So of my beloved fruits, I am a bit more partial to the apple.

This only makes sense, if we consider that, for me, the apple is something analogous to the first-born. I learned to make applesauce when I was very young; it was, if not the first, among the very first of my lessons in cooking at my grandmother’s side. The first pie I ever made was apple (the second, as I recall, was lemon meringue). I made apple butter for years and years before I ever made cherry preserves. Of course, availability has a lot to do with it, what with apples being grown everywhere in great quantities and variety, and sour cherries both few and far between. This is another reason for choosing them—if one had to choose.

Fortunately, I don’t. But while it is apple season and not cherry season, I will certainly put them to good use. And in honor of thinking back to baking in my younger and much younger days, I offer this quintessentially French apple tart. I made it all the time back in the 70s and 80s, when I cooked mostly French food. I haven’t made it in years, but it’s due for a comeback.

Country French Applesauce Tart

This homey tart combines an applesauce base with sliced apples and an apple glaze. Use an all-butter pastry for this. The directions are general; this is more of a method than a recipe. Serves 6.

Tart Pastry 

2 cups a-p flour
8 oz (1 stick) cold unsalted butter
1 egg
½ tea salt
2-3 T ice water

In the food processor, pulse the flour and salt briefly. Place the butter into the bowl, cut into 8 pieces, and turn them over to coat; drop in the egg. Pulse until crumbly. With the machine running, add the water, a little at a time, until the dough comes together. Form into a disc and chill.

The Applesauce

1 ½ lb apples, cut in quarters
3 T butter
½ cup white wine
½ cup sugar
½ tea cinnamon
1 tea grated lemon rind

Put everything into a pan and bring to a boil; reduce somewhat and cook until the apples are soft. Strain, without pressing, the liquid, and reserve. Then put the apple mixture through a food mill. Taste the sauce and add a little more cinnamon if you want; this tart should not be as heavily spiced as an American apple pie, though.

The Tart

3-4 firm, tart apples
1 ½ -2 cups applesauce
1 egg"
The reserved liquid from making the applesauce

Preheat the oven to 400F. Roll the dough out to 11” or so to fit a 9” tart pan with a removable bottom. You will have extra dough, with which you can make little jelly turnovers or a mini version of the tart if you want.

Cook the reserved liquid from the applesauce down until it forms a light, soft, syrupy jelly; add a little sugar if needed. It should be fluid enough to use as a glaze. Thin it with hot water if you overdo.

Put about 2 cups of the applesauce into a small bowl. Beat the egg and stir it into the applesauce. Fill the tart shell about 2/3 full with the applesauce (perhaps 1 ½ cups or so; you will have leftover). Peel and core the apples, and slice them thinly. Arrange the apples in concentric circles, slightly overlapping each slice, working from the outside in and reversing direction of the slices with each circle. Form a little circle of apple and place it the center. Bake for about 30-35 minutes, until the edges of the apples begin to brown. Remove and let cool for at least 20 minutes; glaze with the apple jelly, slightly warmed. Remove the tart from the pan.

                                                                    

Apples: Fall’s Favor, Local Flavor

 

If summer must end, and end it must, at least we can face Labor Day with the comfort of pie for breakfast. The apples are coming in, and we can look forward to fresh, not storage, apples, for two months or more, if all goes well. I’ve written before about Lodis and Yellow Transparents, very nice apples for a simple tart or for sauce, but another fine early apple is the Mutsu, a dead ringer for a Granny Smith, but actually a cross between a Golden Delicious and a Japanese variety, the Indo—the apple, in fact, is Japanese in origin. I’m not a fan of the Golden Delicious—to put it nicely—and the Mutsu is not my favorite—for that honor, I still hold the Gravenstein, Stayman Winesap, Cortland, and Jonathan and Baldwin dear—but it is good, juicy, crisp, and tart-sweet—and here now. You may know it as a “Crispin,” another, apt name for it. Use whatever tart, juicy apple you can find, as they will be superior, even if not as cosmetically unreal, as apples from the store. As the great Joni Mitchell sang, “give me spots on my apples"; these Mitsus were beautifully imperfect.

The Mutsu makes good sauce, but I’ve had a hankering for apple pie with store cheese since earlier this summer. Talking one day about food, a new friend and I discovered that the hands-down favorite breakfast of both of us was apple pie. Old New Englander that he was, from a pioneering farm family whose family has lived in Little Compton for hundreds of years, his fondness was for pie with melted cheddar cheese on top; this was the way it had been served to him from childhood. I had grown up eating it with heavy cream or ice cream (yes, even for breakfast), and had not had it with cheese until I came to Rhode Island for college. But I had never had it with melted cheese, only accompanied with a wedge of cheese on the side. I knew apples and cheese were a popular combination for pies in New England—I’d even had cheddar cheese baked inside them, and cheddar crusts. But the idea of cheese melted on the crust was news to me.

So of course I had to try it. There’s an old saying, “An apple pie without the cheese is like a kiss without the squeeze.” See what you think. Me, I quite liked the savory-sweet-spicy combination of the fruit pie and cheese. But it would probably have been even better with a little ice cream, too.

Apple Pie with Store Cheese

My friend says his mother always used yellow cheddar, but I used the ultra-sharp store cheese, which I almost always have on hand.

Pastry for a double-crust pie

Use any crust recipe you like—homemade, please—or my usual butter-lard crust or all-lard crust. Make according to directions, pat into two discs, and chill, wrapped in wax paper, in the refrigerator. Remove when you start the pie so pastry is still cold and firm but not hard when you are ready to roll.

The pie

8 large apples
¾ cup sugar
1 ¼ tea best, fresh ground cinnamon
¼ tea ground cardamom
pinch salt
3-4 T flour
2 T unsalted butter

Preheat oven to 375 F. Use a 9” pie plate, preferably glass and deep dish.

Place the sugar and spices in a large bowl. Using a small sharp paring knife, peel and quarter apples lengthwise; starting at the stem end (which helps prevent   breaking), core the apple quarters—the cores generally pop out. Slice each quarter into 4 or 5 slices right into the bowl, tossing briefly with the sugar after each apple to prevent browning. (Lemon juice, by the way, is unnecessary with fresh apples, which contain a lot of pectin, and I don’t particularly like the added  taste). Add the flour and toss; I use the full ¼ cup flour for very juicy apples, 3 T for less juicy ones.

On a floured board, roll out your dough into a circle 2-3” larger than your overturned pie plate—I use a deep dish plate, so that implies the larger circumference. Loosen the pastry and fold it lightly in half, lift, and unfold into the plate, fitting and smoothing it in gently along the bottom and letting the edges hang over. Pile the apples into the plate, pushing some down into edges; pour over any remaining juices; and dot with the butter. Roll out the second round of pastry, roll it loosely around your pin to lift it up, and unroll it over the top of the  apples. Tuck both crusts under along the rim of the plate, crimp, and prick around the edge and in the center with a fork. I do not glaze my pie. Bake in the center of the oven until golden; the syrupy juices begin to ooze out; and a skewer enters and removes easily from the apples. Turn once during baking; if the edges get too brown before the pie is done, cover the rim with foil or one of those handy pie protectors (an aluminum ring that sits on the edge). Total baking time will be about 40-50 minutes, depending on your apples.

Cool completely or to nearly room temperature before cutting. To serve with cheese, grate store cheese over the top and broil briefly until melted and the cheese begins to brown.